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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • If everybody acts collectively in their own interest, we all win.

    I mean this is only really true so long as everyone is allowed to vote, which is inevitably never the case. We always have certain subsects of the population which aren’t really given access to democracy. It’s very easy to, even in a “total democracy”, still have a ton of xenophobia and imperialism, because obviously, people who aren’t citizens can’t vote. That’s a very large top-down example, right, but this creation of subsects happens at every level. Famous more american examples are gerrymandering and the electoral college.


  • The goal wasn’t to cover every single wall, just to poison the discourse.

    They’ve successfully done that anyways even if all their bots get called out, because then they will have successfully gotten everyone to think everyone else is a bot, and that the solution and way to figure out if they’re bots is to basically just post spam at them. Luckily, people on the internet have been doing this for the past 20 years anyways, so it probably doesn’t matter and they’ve really done nothing.


  • daltotron@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldBlursed Bot
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    8 months ago

    I dunno, I’ve definitely seen enough people immediately default to, oh you’re a paid russian troll, chinese troll, in almost any political argument as a sort of easy thought terminating cliche, just as people will do so by calling anyone they disagree with fascists or SJWs or whatever the new terminology of the last 5 years is. Wokies, maybe, I dunno. This is just a slightly more conspiratorial extension of that, I think. It’s not so much that everyone will be convinced that everyone else is a bot, it’s that there will probably be more than a select few people that start to believe dead internet theory style shit, or start to punch at ghosts that don’t exist. I don’t know if those people would’ve just like, naturally existed otherwise, either, like if they would’ve naturally been paranoid schizos, I think probably they wouldn’t have and our actions do indeed have an affect.

    But then this conversation is littered with “I thinks”, so it’s all just sort of, tautologies and feelings, so who really knows. I just don’t think it’s probably good for people to basically engage in mass amounts of what is basically spam, and then have that be acceptable just because it’s “funny”.





  • You know this does kinda make me wonder how many examples there are of what’s basically the exact same shot that aren’t the akira motorcycle slide. I know there’s another specific set of anime trope shots of characters getting crucified, as an homage to the many times it’s happened in ultraman. There’s another one of characters holding a sword with a super exaggerated perspective so the tip is close to camera and the character is farther away. Then there’s the infamous “crazy” shot, where you do a kind of fish eye lens close up to the character’s face.

    Certainly, if you wanted to get more general and all-encompassing, you could take every form of shot reverse-shot used in a conversation as a pretty common example, though that one arises more out of necessity than anything else, I think. The coen brothers and occasionally wes anderson are a good example of how to make that actually be interesting, I suppose. I definitely think I’ve seen the “staring out the window” shot more than once, usually on a bus, since that’s a pretty good opportunity to use it, as the protagonist isn’t driving, and that’s an example that’s little more specific than just shot reverse-shot.

    I dunno, I kinda wonder what are some other good examples of shots like that. Shots not iconic or specific enough to entail a clear reference to something, but shots that are specific enough that they don’t arise solely out of necessity, but arise out of a need to illustrate a common cinematic point. Shots that exist as shorthand, basically. I think it’s probably in those shots that we’d very clearly see “cinema”, as an artform, as a language that communicates things to the audience. Any shots like that come to mind?



  • daltotron@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEgg Rule
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    11 months ago

    This. Have no clue where these people are living, probably in proximity to a larger city, but everywhere I’ve ever lived (mostly smalltown shitsville suburban america), your options are maybe a corner store that has your bare essentials, at an insane markup (mostly, I suspect, in order to exploit people who don’t own a car, forgot something on their way to the grocery, whatever. Capitalize on proximity.), or like, a 20 minute drive to the grocery store. 20 minutes both ways, plus the time you spend in the store, and parking, and traffic. That’s probably like an hour out of your day, at the least. Probably more, since you’re usually getting all your week’s worth of groceries at once, since you wanna minmax your time.

    Being in a commercial district and not an industrial one, and, being as most people drive their cars everywhere, and everything tends to be spread out to meet parking minimums, you probably don’t end up close enough to the grocery store to pick up stuff on your way back from most of the other things you’re gonna be doing. It all leads to more dedicated trips where you want to plan out more thoroughly what you’re buying and what you’re eating through the whole week, there’s not a lot of spontaneity there. Even plan out what you’re doing for fun, which I think is kind of antithetical to the idea of having fun.

    I have never lived in a place where all of this wasn’t the case.


  • Yeah, I mean, I don’t think the two groups are that dissimilar. I think both groups are also probably also fine with voting. I just haven’t seen anyone who actually thinks that voting is bad, I think at most I’ve seen people who think it’s a waste of time, or useless, maybe, but it’s kind of hard to make a convincing argument, generally, that taking say the, you know, at most like 7-8 hours to vote is a completely unjustifiable waste of time. That’d be a pretty extreme example and I don’t expect someone voting in that circumstance would realistically change anything, though, it’s more probable that someone could probably vote in like, just around an hour.

    My point is more just that these people aren’t like, illogical ingrates, I guess. I dunno. I see both sides of this issue, I think people are mostly talking past each other and taking out mutual aggression because they don’t really have any other way to feel like they’re doing anything politically productive. Like in this thread the most disagreement I’ve seen is people who are like “Joe Biden isn’t ice cream!”. That’s not really a real disagreement with the core point being made, it’s like, a disagreement with the framing of the issue.

    My other point, I guess, is that talking about these things in the abstract is a pretty quick way to get everyone pissed off. It sort of, “gets to the heart of the disagreement”, right, in terms of, oh, here’s where our worldviews diverge, but it doesn’t really do any of the work of convincing someone. I think in this case it’s a pretty narrow gap, to convince someone, it doesn’t seem like there’s that big of a divide. Anyone given to like, “Oh joe biden sucks I wish I could vote for someone more left wing” is probably going to mostly agree with everything else you might say.

    Instead of like this argument in the abstract, it would probably have a higher success rate to argue about like, the NLRB not sucking right now, or the infrastructure bill and the amtrack stuff, or the student loan forgiveness, stuff like that, actual policies, and then I’d imagine people arguing the opposite would be like “oh well none of that stuff is really extreme at all or as extreme as we wanted”, or basically “too little too late”, and then, you know, I mean I’ve never seen anyone do this, but I think at that point you’d just have to like, give them the point of voting to maintain from a backslide, vs revolutionary action which helps actually make progress. Both are somewhat important and also somewhat contextual.

    Like this whole thing is just a “dual power” problem, I guess. I dunno, I just find it really grating to like read through thread after thread of this same exact discourse happening when nobody’s goals are actually mutually exclusive, you know? It’s like neoliberal identity politics taken to the extreme, where everyone identifies as a revolutionary or as a reformist and everyone assumes and argues their own position instead of like just acknowledging their similarities and doing something about their common goals. It gives me serious COINTELPRO handbook vibes.


  • I thought I remembered pretty definitively during elementary school that there was like, a big red button next to the bus driver, that the kids were supposed to hit in an emergency, while you were supposed to also steer the bus and keep from crashing in the meantime. I could be wrong, though, or that could not be the case on public buses or buses of other types, I dunno.

    Also, the buses did infamously have emergency exit doors, so you could always just open the emergency door in the back of the bus and jump out. That’s probably the other best option, relative to going over a cliff. Road rash can be pretty severe and bad, and you could get a concussion or snap your neck if you don’t know how to do the jump out sideways rolly thing. I dunno though, seems like you could do it probably.



  • I’m talking about the ones who are so proud of their principled take of not voting and telling others how that doesn’t change the system and how the actual change happens through other means. And then the other means they are doing are maybe some complaints on social media, which is just lol.

    I mean, who are these people, though? I’ll take your word for it, but I haven’t really seen anyone IRL actually advocating for this as a strategy, and I haven’t seen anyone legitimately advocate for it in a meaningful way, like, in a way that actually matters. The most I’ve seen to that effect is like, protest votes from people in california, which, sure, whatever, doesn’t really end up mattering because their district is still going to overwhelmingly be blue. I haven’t seen anyone legitimately advocate for just like “nah I don’t wanna vote” as a legitimate strategy. The most solid stance I’ve seen people take is “I dunno if it matters, I would rather talk about local outreach” or whatever whatever.

    I also don’t understand why the consistent instinct against voter apathy is just like. This, always, it’s always like, “oh you need to vote or else we’ll all get annihilated by freiza’s death ball” or like “you have to vote because not voting is for bitches” type stuff. I have very rarely seen the discussion go from like, this abstract talk to more concrete oh what has joe biden done positively, what might trump do very poorly, type of stuff, much less have I ever seen talk of actual interesting electoral politics about how people should vote, or who’s vote matters where, or whatever.

    I dunno. It’s just annoying, I’ve seen this argument play in the abstract probably hundreds of time at this point, straight up, no joke, and also in real life. That’s only me counting this election season, too, and not the last 3-4 elections where basically the same set of conversations occurred.



  • You know, as much as I do like this website, I do find it kind of tiring how the top posts tend to just be like. Like this is an NPC meme, you know? This is a chad vs virgin type of meme. This is about a step away from choosing to portray your opposition as a soy wojack. Sometimes I find that kind of funny because of how absurdly idiotic and brainbroken it reveals the creator of the meme to have been, but I dunno, something about the mainstream adoption of this kind of thing is just kind of incredibly depressing. It’s like I am seeing the mainstream consciousness break apart in real time.

    Can we go back to advice animals and rage comics, guys?


  • daltotron@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldTell me what it means
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    1 year ago

    yeah, I see all your extreme gen X nostalgia, dial-up internet browsing, floppy disk hole punching, cassette pencil rewinding, unshielded electronics interference having, family party line sharing, coin return checking asses, and I raise you something only REAL old kids will remember:

    Silly Bandz. Only the real old heads will remember kids trading various kinds of silly bandz with each other. Alternatively, depending on how much the people around you believed in pseudoscience, the power balance hologram bracelets could also be found around people’s wrists, at that time.


  • if anything, I would think it’d be the opposite. LEDs are pretty capable of more narrow bandwidths natively, but old streetlights used to be a more pure kind of yellowy color, because they were low pressure sodium vapor lamps. Those kinds of lamps give off an incredibly narrow bandwidth of yellow light, and are pretty energy efficient. I would think, as we’ve made the transition from that to more wide-bandwidth LEDs, more insects would be attracted to the lights, and more insects would die. But I’m not quite sure one way or the other.


  • I always thought that narrower pressure vessels could contain higher pressure, because the curvature is more severe, meaning that for a vessel that needs to retain a similar level of pressure, you could just use less material in the walls of the vessel. Is this not the case with these new cans, and they have the same wall thickness, or is the tradeoff just one that still works out to be in favor of more total aluminum usage?


  • I think that most of the criticisms directed at the industrialization and mecha stuff is mostly just a byproduct of the worldbuilding in korra broadly not being very good. Not even necessarily bad a lot of the time, but just not as good as avatar.

    Bending styles became more homogenized and choreography is worse, everything became a kind of 1920’s hong kong steampunk, and lots of the city shots, there’s basically nobody walking around. You have things like tasers and huge mechas, but huge mechas and tasers without explanations for how they’re getting such dense energy storage, or circumventing some real world problems with those technologies in a 1920’s context. With various forms of bending, you can kind of get around the energy density problem a little bit, since it’s just straight up magic that seems like it violates conservation of energy, but with korra’s stuff, that doesn’t apply a lot of the time.

    Lots of little things like that kinda give the impression that the world is made of paper mache, or that a lot of things are just kind of done because they’re a cool idea, rather than because they’re both a cool idea and make a little bit of sense. I’m not really opposed to the idea of a car in the setting, but it strikes me as quite a bit easier to power a car if you have a mobile human power plant that can produce large amounts of energy. I think it’s also kind of a shame to disconnect the tech from this for a different reason, as well, and that’s because it means that the bending is kind of, less broadly useful and applicable. It takes up less space in the setting, it has less utility, it’s not as cool, and the show doesn’t really end up giving many good replacements for it as time goes on.

    That’s really nitpicking, though. I think the broader point is just that there wasn’t much done in the series to really show the continuity between ATLA and korra (do not mistake this for fanservice), and they really feel like different shows. Feels kind of like about a quarter of the reason why people didn’t like the last jedi, but that’s kind of a whole other deal. Anyways, that being the case, korra’s more of a stand alone kind of deal, and I think it kind of falls flat on it’s own, because it just isn’t very good and I don’t like it as much as the OG.

    You also get a lot of people that will blame all the problems on the show that it kept getting renewed season after season without any real knowledge of the future viability of the show, but I think I would still just blame the writing, in that respect. You can make a good, contiguous series of media based only on good improv, only on good setup and payoff, external to the idea that the show has multiple locked-in seasons. I don’t think it matters too much, if you’re good enough. Main example there is probably just venture bros, though.