Yeah. I get that they couldn’t just have the trailer be “this guy wakes up in a spaceship and we can’t tell you anything else,” but maybe they should have.

I was willing to forgive them for spoiling the context of the mission (even though it’s still significant), but come on man. You guys knew that was a secret. You knew.

1. Hooray
2. I was all set to congratulate the trailer on making a compelling case for the movie without any significant spoilers, but so much for that lol

Cool Hand Luke, too

Phase 2: Prison labor

It also carries the side “benefit” of getting farm owners (and, indirectly, anyone who cares about being able to eat food) complicit in and supportive of the “person who didn’t do anything wrong -> detention” pipeline as it ramps up and expands.

You heard it here first.

Some parts of being human are universal

“that is not always factual”

• The number is a lot higher than 100,000. The Lancet estimated 186,000 as a conservative lower bound almost exactly a year ago.
• The Health Ministry never said the number was 45,660. They said the number of specifically named and identified people they could count up and prove were dead was 45,660. Implicit in that was that the true number was much, much higher, but of course the worldwide press will misconstrue everything they have to say, so they had to limit it to deaths that were absolutely ironclad and provable (not that it stopped people from claiming they were lying.)
• A lot of people have died since January 2025. That was before the starvation really set in.
• Counting up the people who directly died by violence is going to miss a ton of dead people.
• It’s not a “war.” As this whole analysis should make clear to anyone who’s looking at it honestly. Calling it a “war,” framing things in terms of “how many women and children have been killed in this war, which is inappropriate conduct in the course of fighting a war, they shouldn’t be doing that while they fight their war” is absolutely and completely missing the point of what is happening.

Only works if you have a billion dollars though. If you do it on a big scale, they’re just going to Aaron Swartz you.

Yeah, I never heard of that, I was just going off of “Tuf Voyaging” and “Seven Times Never Kill Man” and all that wonderful stuff. I read about it and:

The series originated from a long-running campaign of the Superworld role-playing game, gamemastered by Martin and involving many of the original authors. The framework of the series was developed by Martin and Snodgrass, including the origin of the characters’ superhuman abilities and the card-based terminology.

How could anyone say this man is not legit

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

“Tolkien wasn’t anything special.”

Yeah, I kind of wasn’t sure what to make of that statement either. I agreed with almost all of what she had to say, and I thought it was a really cutting diagnosis of why the speculative fiction genre went from being so wild and inventive up until sometime in the 70s, with literary merit and wonderful to read, into being a pretty boring cash cow with formulaic stories that killed the genre. But yeah Tolkien was special.

I also didn’t like how she set up GRRM as some kind of antagonist to Tolkien. “Game of Thrones” was a little bit of an outlier into the “standard fantasy formula” territory compared to a lot of GRRM’s fiction. I would actually hold him up as an example of one of the old-school speculative fiction authors that’s just telling his own stories without really being hemmed in by convention or boring-ly adhering to it.

But yeah those issues aside I thought it was a really informative and important piece. Oh well, looks like I am the only one maybe.

Fair enough, I shouldn’t have gotten personal with it, sorry about that.

But “your eyes start to bleed” and “your pupils dilate from the trauma”, “roll for therapy”, “take psychic damage”, those are a different story… The punchline there is that a man seeing another mans dick is traumatic, and that’s only “funny” because homophobia.

Jesus Christ you are a caricature of why people don’t take the left seriously.

1. It’s a joke, a silly joke. There’s nothing homophobic about any of this. I have heard women make similar jokes about what awful trauma they experienced after seeing something they didn’t want to see. It’s just not a gendered thing, in this case, at all. I do understand that some men can also introduce homophobia into the equation, but I don’t see any of that here. Just saying that you found seeing a big dick unexpectedly to be a deeply upsetting event is a perfectly realistic thing to make jokes about.
2. It’s literally a crime to expose your dick to a woman as a man, and a pretty serious one. It can get you put on a list for life, it can change your future if you do it once. “Break your concentration” is deliberately downplaying the seriousness that society allocates to it (when people are not making lighthearted and not-at-all-homophobic jokes), so that you can do your grandstanding.

That is all I will say on the matter. We’re allowed to have a difference of opinion, I’m just stating mine which is disagreeing with your take on it.

?

Most straight women and most straight men have an alarmed and upset reaction if they see an unexpected penis while going about their day. I don’t see this as being a gendered thing at all, although some of the details of the nature of the alarm are gendered and could even involve homophobia, it’s mostly just that suddenly seeing a dick is most often a negative experience.

I literally don’t see anything about this that has to do with sexuality in any way, it feels like you’re just trying to shoehorn that in there.

Exhibit A: the text tool.

Oh… yeah, you’re not wrong.

Then suffered with GIMP for a few years, hating every nanosecond of it, til PhotoGIMP came along.

You’re also not wrong that the GIMP developers stubbornly refusing to create something like this as the normal way of doing things is evidence of them not really caring about how well their software works out for most people who are going to use it.

If you needed some more evidence, holy shit the scripting interface is bad. However bad you think it is, multiply that by about 3 to 5 times, and that’s how bad it is. I’m not trying to talk trash on people who made something awesome which I use frequently which does the job I need it to do perfectly (and were fine with making it available for PhotoGIMP to take advantage of to make some different thing to serve other people’s need). But holy shit the scripting is bad. It’s so bad.

1. Yes, AGI is a massive threat that people in a position to invent it are investing effectively 0 effort into mitigating.
2. The current generation of "AI"s are trumped-up autocorrect, they don’t plan or scheme. I know the one about threatening to reveal the affair was set up to do precisely that, I guess to make a point or create a story.

What did you try to do that you found confusing or difficult? I’m genuinely just curious.

Idk, I guess it is personal taste but I like GIMP substantially better. The whole “separate windows is the default” thing is a baffling and wrong decision, but once you get over that small hurdle, it just seems like everything is more straightforward. Every time I have to rotate an image or something in Photoshop it’s just weird and off putting.

Maybe it’s just what I’m used to. And, some fancy things like layer effects or AI image stuff are straightforward in Photoshop whereas in GIMP you have to go into the awful scripting if you can do it at all. But to me for most things GIMP is easier and better.

Instead of asking people to install a GNU / Linux-Libre operating system immediately, they now ask people to install Libre-Office, or something

This is a great idea, but I think I would really emphasize the “or something” part of this, not the “Libre-Office” part. It needs to be something that’s an upgrade or at least on par with what they were doing before experience wise (GIMP instead of Photoshop). I actively recommend against people I know taking on free software stuff that I use, if I know that it’s a pain in the ass to get going with just to avoid a bad experience that turns them off to the idea.

He was in the Virginia militia for 9 years. IDK how much actual fighting he did, he started out as a colonel so maybe not much, but he was in the military.