Thanks for the heads up.

Yep, a preview for what’s being done to the US now

I’m just curious if spaces such as that even exist, and if they do, what they lead to.

I don’t know about lemmy since I’m old enough to not care to go looking for that, but I can speak in generalities from a few decades back.

So, I ran an old-school forum in the late 1990s/early 2000s. I found that a complete lack of moderation leads to bad actors essentially ruining the vibe. Basically, there are human beings (and bots plied by state actors in this day and age) that will happily exploit a fully-unmoderated forum and fill it full of awful stuff.

Now, bad mods are awful, power-tripping and all, and lots of regular people who have never run a community of any sort have had run-ins with mods that have the HOA Karen mentality and come to the not-entirely-correct conclusion that ALL moderation is bad, but having no mods can ALSO kill a community if it gets big or noticed enough to draw in outsiders, because you end up with the bullies running roughshod over everyone else, and changing the vibe. And if the vibe gets too gross, you lose the decent, cool members because they’ll fuck off elsewhere and do their thing elsewhere because your community is too full of bullshit and crap.

You could start by NOT sowing despair.

but I was around listing to music in 2001 and we all voted that Creed sucks

Can confirm, was also listening to music in 2001, and Creed sucks

Given current events though, I wonder if Disturbed and System of a Down will be moved to make something new.

I’m having a bad day, but kitty cats make me smile, so give him a pat for me. And a hug.

This is when you use the kiteh as your pillow. (It’s a massage pillow; it vibrates and kneads.)

Pretty sure that plant is trying to mind-control him.

Arcane.

I missed the hype for Arcane season 1, mostly because it didn’t really seem up my alley. I figured it’d be boring to me because I wasn’t into that specific game, or too juvenile for me, or something.

I was really wrong. Really, really wrong. It stands on its own and season 1 has the strongest storytelling I’ve seen in anything in a good, long time. You don’t need to care about or play League of Legends to watch the show. And it’s very much NOT a kid’s show even if it starts with kid characters…it touches a lot on crime, poverty, mental illness, etc. It’s very honest and truthful and complex and nuanced on these things.

And every aspect of storytelling was strong. EVERY ONE.

What I mean by that is this…in most TV shows, animated or live, you usually have one form of strong(ish) storytelling carrying the entire thing and compensating for other things that are weaker. So a show will have one or two stand-out aspects, and others that are okish to bad, but able to be overlooked because of the other awesome things going on.

Like, you might have a poor script but really good actors who can elevate the poor script with their spoken intonation or physical acting. Or you might have a good script and really good soundtrack but mediocre acting and bland costume/set design. Basically, script, art/costume design, music, and actor ability all play together to deliver a story, and usually you have one or two of those that are strong, and the rest are being carried by the strong parts and ranging from competent-but-not-awesome to mediocre to bad.

Arcane’s not like that.

Arcane has top-tier storytelling on the writing level, AND on the art and animation level, and in the choice of songs for the soundtrack. Like, the script itself is fantastic, but then you watch the animation and see they decided not to use common animation shorthand. Instead, they went back to actually LOOK at how humans display emotion and move their bodies and translated THAT into their animation. So you have a strong script AND strong “physical acting”. How they frame shots is fantastic too. And if that wasn’t enough, all the music is stellar and pertinent to the scenes it’s used in. And if THAT wasn’t enough, even the design of the characters BEFORE they even move or speak is top-notch. And if THAT isn’t enough the voice actors are phenomenal too.

For Season 1, nothing’s carrying anything else, everything is strong. And that’s EXTREMELY rare in ANY show. So, so, SO rare.

Season 2 is not as good–but that’s really just in comparison to how outrageously and unusually good Season 1 was. I’d say in Season 2, the script is not as tight, but all the other things are still as good as Season 1. So the animation/art design/music/etc. carry the script a little in the second season. The script isn’t HORRIBLE though…it’s mostly the pacing is off and it’s missing some appropriate build-up in some parts. I’ve read they had to cut some scenes, and if that’s true it would completely explain the flaws. The second season also suffers a bit in comparison to Season 1…Season 1 did everything right, so anything that’s not perfect in Season 2 naturally sticks out. It doesn’t make it bad though.

Anyway, yeah. Watch Arcane, if you missed that boat previously.

Meta-comment here:

Cynical opinions like this one that I am responding to may or may not be real. But ultimately, whether that user is expressing a genuine opinion or is a bot, the end result is the same. This comment and ones like it work hard to drag down morale for people who read these opinions and unconsciously internalize them without thinking critically.

Lost hope and cynicism turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy, simply because it’s a numbers game. By that I mean, the act of saying and acting like everything is forever doomed and “nothing can change so why try” results in an end-state of such doom. If you don’t try anything, you’ll never win anything.

This is why comments about staying home, doing nothing, things don’t change, whine whine whine are so yummy for propagandists to post online. It’s how they put their thumb on the scale, by convincing people that all is lost before anything is even begun.

Zero effort to change something for the better means in a very concrete way that nothing will get better. It’s like multiplying by zero. Taking no chances to change things means you just dump any chance that might otherwise have been there right into the garbage. It’s like a dude who never, ever asks a girl out complaining that he never has dates. You have to TRY to get even the OPPORTUNITY to attain a goal. The overall chance for something good to happen might not be as huge as you’d LIKE it to be…but it’s bigger than zero if you try. But if you don’t, it’s an automatic “multiply by zero” and the chance for anything to happen is flat out wiped from the game board.

I just want to call this out because this dude’s comments are cluttered with the type of doomy thinking that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And you shouldn’t just nod with him or her unthinkingly. You should think carefully about why someone might post a lot of these “opinions” in a comment section. What, from a meta-perspective, seeing a lot of replies repeating this thing might cause a group of people to be pushed towards thinking or feeling.

I sneer at posts like his because I grew up in a shitty home. The adults all around me didn’t try to change anything for the better. Change was too drastic, or too scary, or was “breaking up the family”, or what-the-fuck-ever.

But I left. I got free. I leapt right into the unknown…and it helped a ton, having hope enough to try to change something, and then being able to wake up in a new place where I wasn’t called stupid or threatened with violence every day.

Did everything get totally better forever all at once? Nah. We don’t live in a storybook. But it got better. And as they say, perfect is the enemy of good. And I have seen in my own lifetime that you can make changes of some form or type if you try…but those chances completely wither away if you go into things from the start thinking nothing can ever change.

(That’s how depression gets you by the way–it hides from you many opportunities to change things for the better by altering your thinking so you just lay there and let opportunities pass you by, instead of grabbing them with both fists and hanging on tight.)

There’s some talented fanfic writers out there who could probably make it work.

I read that as Miette and did a melodramatic voiceover in my head.

I wonder if Ukraine is having an effect on attitudes.

Anyway, I can’t speak for others, but one thing I’ve come to realize through life experiences is that the best way to resolve differences is to behave civilly and talk. BUT. I’ve also seen that there are people who do not ascribe to or live by my preferences and ideals for this. There are people who don’t value rationality, there are people who can’t be shamed or pressured by society into behaving nicely and getting along with others. Those people respect the stick, and only the stick. I don’t want to use the stick. But these people do not live by my ideals (which are to talk things out and behave civilly), no matter how I say pretty please to them, and it’s foolish to project my values onto them when I see with my own eyes that they behave and react in patterns different to my own. They respect things that scare them or directly threaten them only, and continue to misbehave if all they’re going to get for it is a finger-wagging and a scolding.

So it seems very wise to “speak softly and carry a big stick”. The military is our stick. There are people out there who will behave in the most horrific uncivil ways right up until the moment they realize you have a big stick, then they’ll suddenly rein themselves in, and you can then be civil and talk things out. But that opportunity to talk doesn’t appear unless you actually have the stick when you’re dealing with folks of that sort of mentality.

It’s very important to look at your opponents with clear eyes and see what they ARE doing, not what you wish they would do, and not what you would do if you were in their shoes. As the saying goes, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

Without laws letting child workers maintain their own bank account in their own name without parents being co owners allowed to drain it at any time, children working become money pinatas for abusive parents.

I say this as someone who would have benefitted from being independent earlier. My uncle did have me work at 14, and when I went to the bank I found he had stolen every penny, and because I was a minor I had no legal recourse to get it back.

A few years later the courts emancipated me, but it didn’t return the money he had stolen. Mind you, he was not working at the time himself and he got a few hundred from the state a month to care for me, and he spent what he stole on computer parts so he could game.

Children working only is in the child’s benefit if there are ironclad laws allowing them to keep their money, and right now there is not.

Not from a video game exactly, but in the early days of the internet, I had urges to delete things instead of putting them into the trash.

My eyes can’t make sense of those tiny wings.

I really don’t like this article because it reminds me of the crazy health nut parents who get disgusted by fat babies and try to make them diet for “health” and instead starve them. Babies are supposed to be fat.

Is the writer here applying guidelines for adults to babies? Babies are supposed to take in foods that are high calorie. I think Nestle is a shit company, but I am extremely suspicious of the article.

Does it turn into a gryphon when it grows up?

And would the fiber from its cocoon be considered fur or silk?

I was raised Catholic in a deeply Evengelical town. The little girls were saying out of the blue that I wasn’t Christian. I was like 8, they were like 6. They were absolutely parroting what their parents said, there’s no way the little girls I played with daily came up with that shit on their own, and since then I’ve noticed that’s one of the “protestant culture” things that gets passed around in those circles and occasionally escapes. That Catholics aren’t Christian because saints or whatever.

They get all wound up about the “pagan” elements of Catholicism then turn around and worship their dollar bill golden idols. Hypocrites!

But basically, Catholics get crapped on when there’s no other minority around and they are tired of talking about Jewish folks.

I don’t practice, I’m atheist, but in the USA from a culture perspective Catholics aren’t in the WASP good old boy group, even if you are otherwise white. And WASP types are happy to let you know it, although its less common than it was a few decades back.

Biden being Catholic, and JFK before him, is basically a dog whistle to certain rightwing groups to make them lose their shit, it’s just less obvious than, say, Obama being black esp if you don’t have a family background that would expose you to that stuff.

People reading along here should note this person is trying to turn blue states purple, they admit it with their own words, and they are appealing to morality to lure suckers in.

As if nobody but them is a moral person

Bullshit.

But a lot of us have religious triggers planted deep, yeah? That if you toddle along with the person claiming they are of virtue, maybe you’ll be a good person too?

Anyway.

Vote like your hair is on fire, because if assholes like this fine upstanding “moral” person has their say and causes blue voters to stay home, we’re gonna be fucked, just as we were before. They’re trying the same tactic that worked before even to give us Trump. And why wouldn’t they? It worked.

No state is “safe” from flipping.

Also note that playing with voting demographics is why a lot of the anti-abortion laws are being pushed…to cleanse purple states of blue voters by driving them out. So when you see anyone encouraging you not to vote because a state is safe, understand it’s part of an effort to flip states from blue or purple to red.