COBOL

Well, I was surprised at the time…

A work can have multiple meanings, even unintended meanings. It can even have no intended meaning.

Its creators define its intended meaning, if any. Valid interpretations can create other meaning from it.

I’ve found that when I’m deciding to try out something creative or artistic, I start to look for techniques in other people’s works when I might otherwise just be enjoying them on a surface level. Anyone can look at a work and say if it’s pretty or not, if it seems well-designed, how it makes you feel, but when you start to ask how an artist does that, you quickly discover techniques that you may be able to apply to your own art, your own writing. You can even look at a list of techniques [1] and then start to identify when creators are using them, and how to use them effectively. The more you experience and the more you think about it, the more understanding and the more tools you have at your fingertips. And by forcing yourself to get into D&D, you’re throwing yourself into a game that will help you develop that variety of skills, and probably into a scene where plenty of people know enough of those skills that you can rapidly learn from them, see what they do brilliantly and see what they could do better.

As for games, I admit I haven’t tried many of them but the Explorable Explanations I have tried are great, particularly the ones by Nicky Case (Parable of the Polygons , the Evolution of Trust , the Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds). I’d call these short games even though they lean strongly towards elements of education and simulation.

Rat

Since this question is asking “should”, I think it’s fine to answer with a rational but radical answer:

• People can be useful to society even if they aren’t employed in our current economies. Retired people may not have jobs, but often still perform productive or necessary labor, like maintenance, artistic contributions, child care, historical preservation. When someone isn’t working for money, they still often voluntarily work for society!
• I believe that, generally speaking, it’s within society’s best interest, even just from an economic standpoint, to support these people even if they aren’t formally employable.
• Looking at most capitalist countries, overproduction is normal. Usable property remains empty just because an owner wants more money for their investment. Perfectly edible food is systematically thrown in bins rather than given to hungry people for free, or rejected by stores because it doesn’t look perfect (like an oddly shaped carrot). Clothes are thrown out once they’re “unfashionable”.

We have all the resources needed to support everyone, and it wouldn’t take much extra effort from a determined government to get those resources where they need to go. There’s no reason why unemployed people should be left to starve and freeze simply because they don’t have enough income. In our society, the scarcity of basic needs is artificial (‘artificial scarcity’).

Automation is seen as a bad thing, a threat, because workers in society are threatened with starvation if they don’t have the income needed for food, shelter, medicine and perhaps basic luxuries. But if our political economy were first-and-foremost based around society’s needs instead of profiting, and therefore we used our modern technology to automate the production of these basic needs and distribute them, then suddenly automation would mean free time and easier labor!

The simplistic ‘left-right’ spectrum isn’t particularly useful when it comes to something as complex and location-specific as politics, left-right is really just vibes in the end. You’re on the right path by comparing policies, and it helps to understand the different contexts they’re in (e.g. US red scare culture), along with the similarities you mentioned.

I think this exercise could be fun and deepen you/our understanding of politics, but at the end of the day, different cities have different material conditions (circumstances) which means the same policy may make sense in one environment but not the other. I think an insightful exercise would be to compare the DSA to your country’s main demsoc parties (PvdA/GL?) and figure out the main differences and why they’re different.

I wonder if it was a romance scam.

There was a person last year going around to websites posting a whole bunch of hastily-made .onion single-page scam websites that essentially just say “Pay $10 to this bitcoin address for the service”. They’d post a series of links, like:

Facebook hacking:

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14h3kjfu4.onion/

Love potion spell

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14hfspopd.onion/

Mystery box

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14fine9ffewh.onion/

[…]

Not only are many of these scam services played out and pretty obvious, like pretending they will hack facebook accounts for $25, and not only were many others ridiculous like a love potion spell, satanic spells, a “mystery box” that you pay $10 to find out what’s in it, but their shotgun approach of listing them all in a single post makes it obvious how fake and desperate it is. I’d be amazed if anyone fell for it, but they kept hand-posting these for months until site owners manually blocked them.

Tor Browser (daily driver) because I really hate surveillance capitalism. I have fallbacks but rarely need them. Can recc LibreWolf and Ungoogled Chromium.

I care more about where they are spent. My local government is spending it far better than my federal government. If it was half my income and was spent in ways that lower the cost of living and improve quality of life, then I’d have no problem with that.

If I get a tax cut, I think, cool, at least I choose where this money goes, because I actually do give some to non-profits that benefit society. Tax amounts are not something which determines how I vote, I gloss over it in the news, it’s just incidental that the anti-worker parties want to raise my taxes and spend them in worse ways.

There are many, many systems of governance out there and plenty of democratic systems are wildly different from the ‘liberal democracy’ we’re familiar with. Cheran in Mexico is an interesting example, five minute documentary.

Nationalism also works the other way. The wins of the privileged are framed as ‘WE’RE winning!!’. Big companies exploit you more and profit? It’s spun as The Economy is going well. GDP went up. That sounds good for you, doesn’t it?

It’s a common practice, a problem with authentic child actors is they generally change once the original actor hits puberty, so higher pitched adult voices are common.

One of the behind-the-scenes videos on a Ed Edd n Eddy disc had some funny stories of the voice actors meeting fans (e.g. Ed’s VA spotting some kid watching the show on a TV while on vacation in Jamaica and throwing in a “huh huah, thut guy is funneh…”) and Kevin’s VA had to keep doing their voice since kids didn’t believe her whenever she mentioned it.

Putting resources into things simply because someone is willing to pay money for it is a huge problem in our world. Once we put a dent in poverty and other existential crises, then let’s consider paying people millions and billions for simply entertaining people with skills and talent. Entertainment, arts and culture are certainly important, but their industrialization and overemphasis under capitalism comes at a very real cost, both to their art and entertainment itself, and to the rest of society.

Here’s a related hill: I am for the abolition of the professional sports industry. Focus on local competitions, actual participation and sports that encourage socially-useful skills, like the Firemen’s Olympics and its modern siblings.

I know some people in the building profession who habitually call out everything in mm, as oppose to most people where I am using cm for most household measurements. So I’m not surprised to see measuring tape (esp a carpenting one) ignoring the redundant cm

Democracy is not automatically “good”. Democracy is a tool. When applied in an appropriate way and to an appropriate voter base (one informed and smart enough to, on average, make a correct vote), it’s a great decision-making tool. It also has the ability to empower a larger number of people, which has real tangible benefits. When applied in an inappropriate way… well just look around. Most liberal democracies have just become a pay-to-win competition for the mega-rich to launder their dictatorship though.

I say this as someone who has designed and run democratic projects, and someone who is generally pro-democracy, yet against most existing “democratic countries”.

It’s also important to note historical cases like the 1917 October Revolution, where there became an interesting question of whether a liberal democracy was more important than putting power in the hands of the working class - the second option was closer to the goals of an ideal democracy, despite appearing to be an anti-democratic authoritarian seizure of power. Consider alternative cases, like democracies which have allowed right-wing authoritarians to legally gain large amounts of power (e.g. Hitler, Trump) and whether it was more important to preserve a malfunctioning liberal democracy or to prevent a harmful regime taking over.

no u

Yep, like @JayGray91@piefed.social said. BlueSky is beholden to the same problems that ruined Twitter. It exists as a business, not a community, and at some point it will try to cash in. It’s repeating history

The word ‘enshittification’ is thrown around a lot, but its original meaning is talking about a process that affects venture capital funded tech, and BlueSky is pressured to follow that process, unlike Mastodon, Pleroma and other alternatives.

It’s not politically incorrect at all. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are just too simplistic ways to interpret our complex world. It’s idealistic to try and put people in such simple categories, and it leads to a delutional worldview.

The only ‘politically incorrect’ part is that some people might jump down your throat for pointing out things about Hitler which weren’t terrible, because unfortunately neo-Nazis abuse this rhetoric as a wolfwhistle or for whitewashing. But as long as you’re clearly not doing that, there’s nothing politically incorrect with saying Hitler drank water.