Now there’s a name I hadn’t heard in a long time.

RIP and damn you Jacen for fallling so hard (even if said fall made for some very compelling writing).

I felt the same way about episode 6’s waning mythological feel, until I recently watched all 6 in the so-called “Machete” order (4 -> 5 ->1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 6). Ending with 6 right after having gone through the prequels ramped the myth feeling up to 11 for me in a very interesting way - there are so many parallels between 3 and 6 and at the same time 6 shines so much the brighter in contrast to 3. There’s a cyclical nature to the whole star wars narrative project as directed by George Lucas that I never noticed for my self until this rewatch, despite having seen all 6 movies over a dozen times each.

Especially the juxtaposition of Anakin’s confrontation of Windu and Palpatine, contrasted with Luke’s confrontation of Vader and Palps. It was always apparent that Luke’s decision to forfeit his life rather than killing his father was his way of breaking his family’s cycle (and symbolic of the rest of the Galaxy breaking free of the empire), but when I was just watching his father condemn the entire galaxy to fascism and evil on the off chance that his wife will be “saved” an hour or two earlier, it just hit different.

Sounds like The Matrix.

They probably think the tree farming that the space age expansion introduces (finally a way to counter your pollution!) is “some gay shit”.

The example case they give is more that the New York Times account can verify that a given, other, account actually is the account for one of their journalists.

To do that with domains, NYT would need to create a subdomain of theirs and let the journalist use it. At that point, might as well let the journalist use their own domain as well as have the NYT account verify the journalist’s account.

Unironically: the patriarchy. “Women and sex exist to serve men’s interests” thus, pleasuring a women in a manner most often associated with that of a man being pleasured by a women (oral sex aka blowjobs here) is ceding too much power to women.

They’re actually confused why women won’t touch them? Jesus.

My thoughts exactly.

This one gets me, as when I learned of the concept of “classic rock”, Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” had just came out and was playing non-stop on the “newest hits” radios.

Season 3 of Legend of Korra does this pretty well, though the villains are also united by an ideology that drives them to act.

Hopefully Syria can be unified and hopefully the Kurds will be treated well.

Agreed.

Big news! I hope this is from a position of relative trust and not the SDF feeling like they will disappear elsewise.

To extend your metaphor: be the squirrel in the digital forest. Compulsively bury acorns for others to find in time of need. Forget about most of the burial locations so that new trees are always sprouting and spreading. Do not get attached to a single trunk ; you are made to dance across the canopy.

A second good read is her follow-up/response post: Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization

Artificial Intelligence Image

For some reason it’s hilarious to me that the person who made this flyer felt the need to specify that the ClipArt-level illustration, placed next to 3-4 pictures of the kid the flyer is complaining about, is not, in fact, an actual image of the kid.

I think downvote anonymity is the bigger part of the problem, not downvotes in general. Unless I’m misunderstanding, what you’re proposing amounts to “if you want to downvote in a community you’ll need to make an account on it’s instance”. This would be a nice option to have, but it should also remain an option.

In your +50/-90 example, showing at least the instance provenance for votes allows more (sub)cases. If I can see that 55 of the downvotes come from the instance hosting the community, that’s potentially a very different situation than if only 5 do. Or if 70 of the downvotes come from a pair of instances that aren’t the community host. The current anonymity of these downvotes flattens these nuances into the same “-40”, which I agree isn’t great when it can lead to deletion - but I’d argue that’s also an entirely separate problem that might be better addressed from a different angle. I find that disabling downvotes from other instances entirely flattens things just as much if not more, just not in the same manner. Instead of wondering how representative a big upvote or downvote count is, I’m now wondering how representative a big upvote count is, period. That might seem like 50% less wondering but with no downvotes at all it might also only be about 50% less votes.

I’m not convinced silencing negative outside contributions won’t just shift the echo-chamber-forming to one that’s more based around a form of toxic positivity and/or reddit-style reposts and joke comments, either.

Revealing from which instances downvotes come from doesn’t prevent opinion downvotes but it allows dulling their bite. The same is true for opinion upvotes.

From my understanding votes are more-or-less already somewhat public on lemmy between it’s implementation and what federation needs to function properly. At the very least, each instance knows how many votes they’re getting from the other instances. We should embrace the nuances federation brings to the problem instead of throwing them away entirely.

So much thought has been put into “how do we convey the different instances’ character and their relations to each other to new (potential) users in a way that doesn’t a) overload them and/or b) scare them away with content that rubs them the wrong way” in communities and posts like these, when potentially we just need to render more visible the data that is already present on the instance servers.

I’ll acknowledge up-front that the “just” in the previous sentence is carrying a lot of weight; data viz is not easy on the best of days and votes have so little screen real-estate to work with. On top of that, any UI feature that can make what I’m suggesting palatable and accessible to non-power users would also need to be replicated across most popular clients. They’re written in a motley assortment of programming languages and ecosystems, and range from targeting browsers to native smartphone OSes, so the development efforts would be difficult to share and carry over from one client to the next. Still, they’re called votes: there’s a lot of prior art in polling software and news coverage of elections from the past few years that should be publicly accessible (at least in terms of screenshots, stills, and videos of the UI, if not a working version of it to play around with).

On top of this, I don’t know how much effort this would require on backend devs for lemmy (and kbin/mbin I forget which is the survivor, and piefed, and any other threadiverse instance software I’m currently unaware of). I wouldn’t expect keeping track of vote provenance to prove immensely difficult, but it could cause some sort of combinatorial explosion in the overhead required by the different sorting algorithms proposed (I’m ignorant on how much they cache vs how often they’re run for lemmy, for example).

I can’t foretell if this would “solve” opinion downvotes on it’s own, but I do think it would contribute to the necessary conditions for people to drift away from the more toxic forms of it. It could also become another option for viewing feeds on top of “subscribed”/“local”/“all” + the different vote rankings.

From what I understand its origin in street racing was because japanese drivers (specifically? might have been Asian more generally) were souping up cars to look pretty but still not run great. I’m hazy on the details and my google-fu is failing me - I wish I had a more precise answer but overall I recall being bummed out at how even the origins of the term weren’t as clean as I had hoped.

Slight question/nitpick over the prequels’ CGI; is the opening space battle [over Coruscant] of Revenge of the Sith somehow not up to par with its contemporaries? That sequence still holds up in terms of visual spectacle that takes advantage of its medium (3d rendering in this case vs practical effects) to do specific shots and set pieces.

Or am I just ignorant of how much the original trilogy pushed things?

Metal Gear Rising : Revengeance

I watched a few playthroughs earlier this year, and was struck by the games’ vibes. Maybe I’ve become jaded, maybe 2013 was just a different time, but the over-the-top-bombastic, gratuitous-yet-totally-sincere meditation on power, violence, and humanity feels incredibly relevant, not to mention a breath of fresh air compared to the games I see coming out today.

It’s also very similar to the type of video game I’d like to make someday, so it counts as homework as well!

Not to mention it feels like half of the media/art that I love from the past 10 years has been heavily influenced by this game, so playing it could give me a fuller appreciation for them.

I suspect the foreign sanctions will indirectly prevent a healthy video games ecosystem from forming in Russia, on top of everything you’ve already cited. With these sanctions, there is even less incentive than before for Russia to crack down on (software) piracy (of foreign games). So their game devs are competing with essentially free and high quality games made by everything from indie devs to huge studios.

I was going to try it out, and then the website asked me for my email :(

I don’t want a feed aggregator that has its own account, I want one that just lets me use my existing network/feed-specific accounts.

I imagine (/hope) that the email-for-signup is only while the software is in alpha/beta/unreleased, to help them get user feedback.

Good luck and don’t forget to bring heat pipes!

(More realistically, given you posted this 11 hours ago; hope y’all weren’t stranded!)