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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • Yeah, no, we’re on the same page. Whether you pin it on the OP or Piker. There are a bunch of presumably leftist pundits that have been asking to see the left’s management all through this process (and I mean since 2016) and will continue to act offended that anybody would suggest there is a responsibility in not being persuaded when the alternative is a fascist anarchocapitalist cabal.

    As last time, the response to any mention of this will be “it’s their fault for not convincing me”, which has never been a legitimate argument but will be outright insulting if (when) things start to go poorly.

    A better case is that the entire country shifted right, especially fed by a mass of new protofascist youth, but you don’t get extra credit for only being part of the problem and not the whole problem.

    In any case, like I said earlier, I have no obligation to split hairs. The US has failed as a country and as a people. They can apportion blame however they see fit. For the rest of us it is now a matter of how to build an international community of democracies in the upcoming climate. We all have to write off the US and find a new way forward without them.




  • I am genuinely considering moving away from English language social media altogether. I find my native language media… kind of exhausting, honestly, but it’s still better than what the last Trump term triggered, so… maybe? It has the side advantage of countering some of the whole cultural imperialism, because hey, I’ll suffer it from US coastal elites, but I desperately need an alternative if it’s going to be coming form Elon Musk and Donald Trump, so…








  • I mean… yeah, the episode isn’t as focused on procedural detail, and I do live for legal process minutia, but I can fill in the blanks just fine and suspend disbelief.

    I mean, the question being raised is whether Data has been operating as a person willingly joined Starfleet or as salvaged equipment. If Data had been roaming around on his own and then applied to join Starfleet I’d be more nitpicky, but he was found and turned on by Starfleet and he seems to have been in the system since, so I can see the question of how to categorize him coming up retroactively. Especially in retrospect, since we eventually get undeniable confirmation that AGI is very much possible within their normal gear.

    I mean, for the record, by the time Voyager comes around we know that they have protocols to use holographic AIs to substitute in for key personnel, so if you can have a “EMH” slot in for an officer you can have a piece of salvaged machinery operate with a rank and then reassign it to a different role… unless that entity has personhood. It IS a sci-fi as hell concept, but a valid one in-universe.

    Me, I would have very much enjoyed Noonyien Soong arguing whether he still owns Data and learn what is legal salvage in Starfleet territory but for the sake of 90s network TV I can see “Is this android truly a life form” being the approach to a Trek episode. And thematically… well, I can’t get through the Goldberg and Stewart scene about slavery without tearing up. It isn’t just how good they both are, it’s the “oh, crap, they’re saying the thing” element to it, too.

    Of course that means Starfleet straight up condoned slavery later, as per Star Trek Picard season 1. I would gladly remove all of Picard from lore at this point, but nope, officially Starfleet had legal proceedings to determine that Soong androids are people and to remove their autonomy is akin to slavery and then went ahead and did it anyway.

    Picard sucks and is the worst Star Trek thing ever, is what I’m trying to say. Yes, way worse than anything in Discovery. Including season three.





  • Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.

    Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None.

    I am screaming at this juxtaposition. This is such techbro thinking, where he’s oversimplifying a single data point to pretend he’s making a data-driven decision (people in a survey said media is biased) and then leaning on a confirmation biased, entirely non-data driven stance (people don’t vote based on newspaper endorsements because I said so).

    I mean, two seconds of thinking will tell you that people think the press is biased because the press is biased. There is no reason “the press” that is causing this impact is WaPo in a world of Newsmaxes, Foxes and yes, MSNBCs. You’re going to need more than a survey you read once to make that determination.

    And obviously, he has done nothing to determine that his choice doesn’t benefit Trump. He doesn’t even claim that, he just… says so.

    Or that his choice moves the needle towards lack of bias, because man, it sure seems like he’s diminishing independence here, not the opposite.

    It’s the same billionare brain rot. It’s the same wonky self-assured, biased thinking where they can’t pay enough brainpower to consider the facts independently and they’re too convinced of their own infallibility to even address basic human biases or defer to actual experts on their random convictions.

    It’s an absurd way to run a business, let alone a country. And there are few enough of these super rich idiots with a direct enough spotlight that we have a full sample size here. We (now) know how Bezos thinks. We definitely know how Zuck and Musk think. They aren’t to be trusted with the decisionmaking their money warrants them under the current system. Their squishy human brains are too weak and broken to handle it without the elaborate, dispassionate social engineering that keeps reasoably designed liberal democracies chugging along.


  • Yeah, that’s the thing about it, right? It has all the pieces of the architecture of a modern console in a world where none of them make sense. Even with the 360 I was probably an outlier, and the reward you got by being able to access 720p video on a CRT PC monitor was much higher compared to a SDTV.


  • Specifically the VGA 480p output, which was a big deal for most use cases.

    I imagine there is some regional differentiation here based on HDTV adoption and SCART vs component, but for reference VGA out was still the sole way I had to get any progressive signal for gaming all the way down to my day one Xbox 360 in 2005, which did not have an HDMI out (not that I had any displays with an HDMI in, for that matter).



  • Or the weirdly anachronistic mess that is the Dreamcast in general. I mean, it’s not easy to visualize today because a lot of the “just a tiny underpowered PC thing” approach ended up winning the day, but the Dreamcast made no sense whatsoever at the time and produced entirely absurd looking games.

    Maybe you could try to rationalize the 480p thing as an advantage today, but at the time screenshot comparisons looked a generation apart next to the PS2.


  • See, this is the part where I’m not going to dismiss your experience, because a lot of this was super regional, but I’m going to say my experience was not that at all.

    I definitely spent most of the money I put in arcades AFTER I had a 16 bit console. The “arcade>marketing>console port” hype cycle went on for a decade after the NES first became a thing.

    And Live Gold is just a sign of something that was going on everywhere. The first free to play hits were happening, WoW was taking over the world and making GaaS mainstream… and yeah, online gaming was becoming a thing on consoles and getting monetized in brand new ways.

    But also, I’d say expansions were a thing way before DLC became a dirty word. Because Groundhog Day I distinctly remember having conversations with angry nerds in the mid 2000s explaining that there wasn’t much of a difference between DLC and a lot of the expansion packs and shovelware content expansions being pushed around all through the late 90s.

    And of course there are tons of games you can buy as a complete thing. As I said above, I’ve been playing Silent Hill 2, Metaphor and a bunch of other stuff that is very classic in its structure. Another constant of gaming nerdrage is that people don’t care if what they like continues to exist, they are mostly clamoring for the things they dislike not existing, which I’ve never been on board with.