@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Anomander

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Sure; it's just so good at being a chat app that it makes a terrible forum.

My understanding is that it can be done and with a whole host of third party tools and bots and a little legion of mods - but that's a ton of work both setup and ongoing, just to reshape Discord into the sort of format that Reddit or Kbin/Lemmy offer pretty much right out the box.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Yeah. Rather a decent number of communities have actually moved to Discord, or are trying to, including a decent sampling of larger communities like MFA.

There's been some kind of wonky takes in Fediverse about some of those moves that seem to reject the validity of migrations that aren't coming to our spaces. Mods will post "going to Discord, fuck this place" and they're like "it's temporary, Discord isn't a forum".

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

The issue there is that it's kind of like saying "the only way to fix society is if everyone followed the law" - it places all assessments of success behind a nearly impossible standard. It also places all responsibility for that success solely onto mods putting their own interests ahead of their communities and/or the interest that brought them to volunteer as mods.

I participated in the protest, I'm here because of them, I facilitated protest actions within 'my' communities that wanted to protest - but I don't think there was a world where mods alone could bring the site to its knees and force Reddit to backpedal. If anything - I think that any hope of dramatic action causing change died on the spot the moment the protest became "about mods" and users experienced the protest as something mods were doing to communities in order to reach Reddit.

So many mods acted unilaterally to shutter communities and the impact of that approach cultivated reddit's existing anti-mod sentiments to fuel opposition to the protests and the cause. The vast bulk of people I saw trolling in protest subs, or arguing against protest in my own subs, were users who already had a history of disliking "reddit mods" as a significant theme in their account history.

But to average users, their shit and their communities and the things they like about reddit were being "taken away" by mods in a dispute between mods and Reddit. The hijack of messaging around the API to be about modding and about how much harder it'd be and how the API changes would affect mods - meant that users were also indirectly being told this was an issue that didn't affect them if they didn't use the apps affected.

The only dramatic impact that would have swayed Reddit Inc and won the matter was a fairly unanimous buy-in from the average user, a clear unified front, and a dramatic drop in user engagement. As long as they have the data showing that people are showing up and are using the site and are interested in using the site, they can deal with the interruptions to major communities and pull more compliant volunteers from the users that remain.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

The most common breach of norms is that I brew almost everything at far weaker ratios than is considered normal; I use a 1:22 or so.

My other big sacrilege is that I tend to enjoy almost any coffee I get my hands on. I can tell the difference, I can appreciate fines coffees from finest farms and roasters - but I can also enjoy far more casual coffees and drinks that would be sniffed at by firmest Specialty sacraments.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

I keep mine next to my tiger-repellent rock!

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Back as a young fella, striking out in the dating market a bunch ...

"Just be yourself!"

No, honestly, that was the problem last time - I was looking for something a little more granular and actionable.

This is one of those helpful and encouraging things that people say without necessarily really thinking it through. Deep down in intent, they're right - you can't fake your way to healthy relationships, being insincere or putting on a performance of being someone you're not isn't going anywhere genuine down the road. Absolutely correct, absolutely great advice - but it's never given in sufficient complexity and depth to be useful.

None of those grown-ups were like "Ah yes, definitely be sincere about who you are - but also don't spend a whole date monologuing about the book you just read or your favourite video game."

That you can be genuine and sincere about who you are, while still using your social skills and putting your best foot forward socially just ... didn't occur. At the time, my understanding was that it was a hard binary - either I was 100% me at 100% volume and whatever came out of my mouth was definitely the best thing I could say, or I was stifling myself and being 'fake' in order to build an equally-fake relationship.

It took a friend's brother taking me aside to make it 'click' - he was holding a can or a bottle and was like "So the whole object is all 'real you' yeah? But any time you're talking to someone is like right now - you can only see the side that's facing you. It's all you, it's all honest, but you still want to show them the best side, the best angle, of the whole thing. Don't sprint straight to showing them all of your worst angle just because that's what's on your mind that day."

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

When ye olde Eternal September hit, many new users did not realize B1FF was satire, and thus chose to emulate the coolest dude on the internet.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

No, it’s mainly called Creme caramel, Panna cotta or Crema Catalan.

All three of these are actually different dishes.

The dish in the photo is called "creme caramel" to the French - but throughout Spain, the Latin Americas, and southeast asia, it is "flan". The version of flan here has direct pedigree linking it to the cake also going by the same name - it was at some point merged. The custard was baked in or on the cake/pastry base. Over time, the two portions were made separately, and which portion got to keep the name has primarily been split along language/culture lines - those from French tradition use 'flan' for the cake, while those from Spanish tradition use 'flan' for the custard.

Flan or creme caramel is effectively a soft custard of milk and eggs, cooked in a special mold with a thin caramel in the bottom, then inverted to serve.

Panna Cotta is "cooked cream" and is made from cream thickened with gelatin. It is a thicker and heavier dessert, and is generally not served with caramel.

Creme Catalan is "almost identical" to Creme brulee, which is a custard - no caramel - that is then topped with a layer of toasted or broiled sugar, forming a hard crust. The only formal difference between Catalan and Brulee is that going by 'official recipes' the former uses milk, while the latter uses cream.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

I always loved the convergence of the various Rustled Jimmies memes popping off, just before Harambe happened.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

The other one was manufacturing and engineering teams 'back home' would scrawl the Kilroy on parts, like while ships or tanks were being assembled, that would otherwise be inaccessible - which meant that when that thing was hit, or taken apart for maintenance closer to the front, Kilroy was like, inside the sealed-up wall or at the bottom of the engine compartment.

In both your example and this one - both growing the myth that no matter where you went, Kilroy had been there first.

According to my grandpa, it was a myth that they used to feed the new guys and green squads, like a Santa myth, and putting on "genuine belief" in the Kilroy myth was as much of a running joke as the myth itself was. He claimed servicemen were also constantly trying to get commanding officers to unwittingly participate, by doing stuff like submitting paperwork signed Kilroy or that referenced him already being somewhere when troops liberated it - in the hopes that report or news tidbit would be one that COs shared as announcements.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

My travel kit matches the kind of travel we tend to do, so there is that limitation;

I have a double-wide milk crate for transport. In the crate goes my Vario, scale, Clever, box of filters, and a bag or two of coffee. Generally the extra space in the crate winds up holding kitchen shit like knives and herbs/spices, as well as various teas for my wife.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

"We're getting paid to put paint on the wall."

I was like 17 or so and had a temp job as a housepainter for a couple weeks, and I was sinking time and energy into doing an excellent job and being really efficient with paint and ... kind of missing the forest for the trees. I was putting unnecessary care & excellence into a back wall and the wall was taking longer to prep than the whole-house job could afford. One of the old guys on site pulled me aside me and, in the eloquent terms above, pointed out that ... the real goal here is paint on the wall. We're doing a good job because we take pride in our work, but the outcome is significantly more important than the journey to everyone else. Doing a "good job" can't wind up as an obstacle to the job itself.

I was always a details person and perfectionist, and that one clear lesson about taking a step back from the details of a task to double-check what the actual goal is ... has always stuck with me.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?

Generally speaking, yes - but also, this is something that will likely fade over time as specific ones stand out. Currently, the plurality is a result of no developed community for that niche existing; as communities settle and grow, less of that sharding will take place unless there's a crisis in the 'main' one.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

I guess the simple syrup must be enough to allow the drink to hold it's foam? How's stability?

I've done some screwing around with steaming espresso prior and it's never 'held' the air in any way resembling this drink.

Anomander, (edited )
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Internet history pedantry, but by the time the subreddit rolled around, the term and the movement had already been coopted.

Incel started as a term for men who felt depressed about being unable to find a female partner, and the subreddit they created was originally a supportive space for them.

The term was coined somewhere between 1994 and 1997 by "Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project" as a term for people of all genders who were unable to find partnership despite trying. Alana is a woman, and is effectively universally credited with coining the term and founding the movement. The movement wasn't 'for men', the term wasn't about men specifically, and it didn't start on Reddit. It started off as more of a personal blog, where Alana documented her own experiences and struggles - the site gained followers from other people with similar experiences, eventually growing into a combined forum / support group / community.

Then it got taken over by angry misogynists and the term became associated with them, while the original group just kind of got forgotten about. That original group deserves attention and empathy as well as the term they coined; the latter group isn’t even “involuntarily celibate,” as they play a very big role in their own celibacy.

Those folks have kind of always been there, and have always been a heavily represented demographic - Alana has said in interviews that the men who joined in the early days did have some concerning views and some concerning themes were on frequent repeitition in the discussions the community had. I don't think retconning the movement to exclude those people from the "true definition" is doing either camp any favours. The "involuntary" part of the label isn't trying to engage with whether or not the barrier may stem from factors within their control, but solely confined to the fact that they want something and are not getting it. They are simply "celibate, but not voluntarily celibate".

One quip that Alana made in several interviews while defining her modelling of the community she founded was that she didn't care why someone was an incel, ie "it's OK if you're celibate because you're into horses, but that's illegal" that that person should still be welcomed and included in the community.

I just think more people should give some thought to who that term originally belonged to.

I think that in light of this, it's even more important to be accurate and honest who those people are: Not male-exclusive, not limited to this or that cause of celibacy, not specifically gatekeeping out the misogynists or the beastialists any more than any other group. Just any people who want to get laid but are not getting laid.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

I have a hard time believing that all of even just most of the men that initially joined her group had “concerning views” if that’s meant to refer to the misogyny we see in those most associated with the term today, but I do know that plenty of the posters I saw on the subreddit years ago when I visited were not of that ilk.

That's fine, but remember you're doubting the one person unique qualified to talk about the developmental history of the movement that they launched from the site that they ran.

I don't think that it necessarily was "all" or "most" but simply that the male presence within the movement was sufficiently represented by individuals with those views that it's one of the first thing she mentions in the context of discussing the growth of the movement itself.

Part of her point seems to be pointing out that they invited those views in, very early in the movement, out of a desire to be inclusive - only to be driven out by those views later on down the road.

I bring that up in this context because I don't think that the movement or the term can be divorced fully from the male misogyny that it's associated with today. Those people are not latecomers to the label, they've been there effectively from the start - from the point where it went from the comments section of Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project blog, to becoming "a community" centered around a shared label.

but I think if the term was originally coined to represent people who were genuinely suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in, it should remain for them and not those who sabotage themselves via their own toxic behavior.

I've used bold to highlight it in the quote above - that is a big "if" that the person who coined the term says is not true. If it were true, we'd be having a different conversation. But it's not true.

The simple fact is that it's a self-identifier. It's a label that people put on themselves based on their perception of their own life circumstances. The original vision for the term says that neither you nor I get to tell anyone else they're "not a true incel" or to go over their life and tell them the barriers are self-inflicted if they don't see it that way. I guarantee you that the people you want to exclude from the term do very genuinely believe that they are "suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they're in." No matter how much your or I might see them and think they're clearly suffering from self-inflicted wounds, they are entirely sincere in their belief that their dating life is out of their control and has been a victim of cruel society.

One group deserves empathy and compassion; the other deserves scorn and derision. I don’t think it’s productive or fair to the former group to use the same term for both.

To me? They're the same group. Some members of the group are hateful and shitty. Some members of the group aren't. I'd say that the overwhelming majority of members, from both sides of that divider, are experiencing obstacles to dating or sex that are self-inflicted, even if they also have other barriers that are not. The vast majority of both groups would tell you that their personal circumstances are wholly out of their own control.

The "logic" that group uses around attractiveness and dating marketability and how this or that facet of looks or wealth or social status or whatever is ultimately spurious. If Ricky Berwick get rich, famous, and married - the absolute hard impassible barriers that incels talk about affecting themselves simply do not exist.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

My biggest overall was shifting route on a road trip so we passed through a specific small town with a cafe I knew about - guy I'd worked with had left us to move home and was working there.

I probably added three to four hours of driving onto the trip.

It was a club trip at college, I only knew a few people in the club - they'd mainly recruited me because I could drive and could rent a car. I was the only driver for our car, was paying the fuel, and the rest of the car had no idea I detoured; we'd otherwise made great time and I pretended to be impressed and mystified when we rolled up and the other carload had been at the destination for an hour or two already. "You stopped for lunch? We stopped for lunch. How did you do get here so fast?!?"

The coffee was OK.

The trip was like a decade ago, and the one guy I'm still tight with from that group only worked our like a year or two ago that I'd hijacked that leg of the trip. He and his wife made a similar trip themselves - he suggested the same cafe "because it's on the way" - and then looked at a map and got really confused.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

I'm on Chrome on two different desktops with most recent windows; I'm getting booted out every 5 - 15 minutes. I had assumed it was deliberate and was eventually going to ask if maybe the timer could be made a little longer.

Generally speaking, the logout timer is shorter than it takes to read the comments section and write anything longer than a paragraph.

It seems connected to "idle" time - I've never been booted out while browsing, but if I pause or do something else I will generally come back to having been logged off. That said, I don't generally browse for 15+ minutes straight, so much as in couple-minute sprints between tasks at work.

For instance, it happened in between logging in to load this thread, reading what everyone else had to say, and posting this comment.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

So that one subscription is effectively how 'my' instance becomes aware any specific community off-instance, in order to check for posts there?

That both makes sense and is rather counterintuitive at the same time.

fell, to random
@fell@ma.fellr.net avatar

I am stirring my with a tablespoon.

Go ahead, call the police.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

@fell Those things are for stirring tables; gotta be real careful when you put the mug down.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

The machine with the arms near the front is a Cafelat Robot, a manual espresso machine and there's a black Niche Zero off behind it. I see the top corner of a Baratza hopper poking out from behind the leftmost coffee bag, but can't make clear determination of the grinder - I think it's an Encore from the matte black shoulder angling I can see a bit of. Black thing in the righthand edge appears to have a Airscape handle, but I can't tell if it's on a jar - too shallow for Airscape - or if that's the bottom of the lid, in which case the tall glossy-black can is an airscape canister.

I think the wooden thing in the back is a pourover stand from like Amazon that did the rounds on Insta a year or so back, but I can't recall it's name or who sold it.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

About Tildes, it seems to be more of a clone of Digg in the old days.

It may resemble digg 1.0, but it's intended as a spiritual successor to pre-diggpocalypse reddit. It's a project by the guy who originally built Automod and is very much like Reddit was just prior to the launch of the subreddit system - two years before digg 4.0 launched and the refugees started arriving.

Intended to be more of a wide-open commons than a platform for subdivided or niche communities.

Tildes has very limited adoption during the reddit protests because it's on an invite system and doesn't want a huge influx of new people all at once, for all that it is accepting and even seeking growth over time.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

This reads a lot like you're kind of working to shit on them, though.

It looks dead.

Ok? I don't know how you'd get that impression and you don't really elaborate, but I don't really see what might lead to that impression.

You can't even join unless you know someone, to recover your password you need to send an email, and the most upvoted post has 500 votes.

Yeah. Invite systems are a valid solution when you're looking to limit the pace of growth, and social media sites like aggregators often want to rate-limit growth in order to avoid an Eternal September moment changing their culture. Password recovery is amusingly antiquated. Their scoring works different and the numbers don't translate 1:1.

The about section has a philosophy section which likely took longer to write than was taken designing the website, and one of the top posts is about how they're going reorganise everything into their equivalent of subreddits. What's the point if you only have 100 users?

Yeah. Welcome to Tildes, a site utterly dedicated to high-concept, high-content, participation and engagement - with near every aspect of its design based around discouraging low-bar contribution and encouraging effortposts. If you personally find a long philosophy section and a ultra-simple aesthetic to be disengaging to you - then they're probably working as intended, and you're just not the target demographic. They're reaching about the same growth point as Reddit did when it made that decision themselves, and from what he said in the announcement they're facing the same problems. They're sitting at numbers well above "100 users" though, - as mentioned, they're not trying to be a highly-active and super-busy space. Several thousand users on Tildes produce a much smaller total footprint than several thousand users on lemmy or kbin.

Because the guy who created it, seemingly doesn't get that times have changed. I mean, the nokia 3310 was a great phone in its day, but it's 2023.

And I get that they don't care, but if your main audience is former mods who like organising things without the interference of users, they're not going to have enough or sufficiently interesting content to attract critical mass and a wider audience.

At which point, you might as well turn your reddit replacement into a wordpress blog and have the same discussions you're having now in the comment section. Because unlike tildes, people are working on plugins which will allow wordpress to become fully part of the fediverse.

This is the part where it's just like ... did Demiorz kill your dog and fuck your wife or something? Because these read as if it's coming from a pretty personal set of feelings for you.

It's a website where you are not the target user. That's fine. You don't need to hate them for that. They don't need to change for you.

If this whole thing isn't personal between you and them and is simply about the fact that they're a 'reddit alternative' that isn't the Fediverse, I think playing Websites We Use like it's sports teams where our guys are the best and everyone else is shit is ... kinda juvenile.

YSK: You should dry off beef before cooking. Doing so promotes the Maillard Reaction, which will make the meat taste and look better. (www.seriouseats.com)

Why YSK: When you cook meat, any water on the surface must first evaporate before much browning can occur. You want to get as much of a Maillard reaction as possible in the limited cooking time you have before the meat reaches the correct internal temperature. Removing the moisture first means that the heat of the cooking...

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Yeah, absolutely nothing was preventing them from doing so already, without launching Threads.

Blocking Meta / Threads instances isn't going to stop them, either.

What will Meta gain from fediversing?

I don’t understand what Meta will gain from participating in the fediverse? Their ultimate goal is to make money of Threads and I just don’t see how encouraging an open federation will help them do it? Even 3Eing the fediverse will not do them much good as they already have sooo much traffic already that killing the...

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

They can already access the data, it's all federated and it's all publically available effectively by definition, they don't need to launch a platform that interacts with Fedi in order to scrape it. And Meta will only be able to scrape user profiling data on the people accessing Fediverse through their own tools and platforms. In the large term, all data is useful and getting the additional facets of how their users interact with a twitter-like platform is good - but I don't think that's really why they chose to federate.

But...

What joining Fediverse does offer them is a way of launching their Twitter-rival product with genuine and organic content or activity already present.

Facebook & Instagram's primary demographics are not internet pioneers, they don't tend to build new things - they feed off existing activity and build on top of it. They access the platforms to consume content, and only move to creating or posting content over time as they develop networks on the sites. Meta cannot realistically launch a Twitter competitor whole-cloth. The sort of people who joined Twitter early to build that space aren't joining a Meta product, likewise the people who join new platforms or normal fediverse.

If it launched empty, it would remain empty. People would check it out, see almost no content or no content they care about, and not come back. Meta can only realistically launch a product like Threads with activity already occurring, and things like AI content or fake profiles aren't necessarily convincing enough to lure in the punters. But Fedi is preexisting and active and there's already A Thing there that Meta can point their users at, there's already content to consume and people to interact with.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

I don't think so; it won't hurt 'us' anymore than we were hurt yesterday, when Threads hadn't launched yet.

bryanhansel, to random
@bryanhansel@mstdn.social avatar

It's interesting how subtle changes such as grind size and water temperature can change the flavor of coffee. It's as if coffee is a magic bean.

#Coffee

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

@bryanhansel almost every variable you might tinker with can wind up having some effect, whether direct or indirect. Absolutely part of the challenge and part of the fun.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Yeah - as of about thirty minutes ago, Apollo just crashes as soon as it boots.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Not formally.

You can reach out and ask; but for the time being they're pretty swamped developing platform/software features and tools for kbin, and while it's on the radar and a planned eventual policy change for kbin.social - it's not taken priority at the moment.

Unlike previous attempts at trying reddit alternatives (like Voat), kbin and much of the lemmyverse doesn’t seem to be plagued with extreme far right buffoonery. (kbin.social)

It’s one thing to have differing views, but I’ve seen enough attempted reddit migrations to be relieved that the popular communities in the fediverse so far haven’t been about crazy racist stuff or other extreme right bullshit....

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

I don't think I jive with the notion that kbin is somehow "above" hating Nazis.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Except that's a sidestep. The viewpoint you were defending was saying that this one specific option, that has substantial academic backing for positive outcomes for kids, should not happen or should be prohibited.

That's not "discuss other options" - that's discussing this option and arguing that society should take it away.

That you're now trying to argue that it's just discussion and it's reasonable debate and - forgive my bluntness - being openly dishonest about what the original speech was that you're defending with "free-speech" and anti-censorship talking points is like ... the example case for how this thread started. The nazis and the transphobes and the hateful bigots can always, easily, spin their own takes as righteous and reasonable debate - if you let them lead the dialogue and frame their discourse through the most-appealing lenses possible. And they can make valid-sounding and appealing arguments for why you, too, should defend them and their right to speak.

But inevitably they are also going to use any and all space you clear for them to be hateful and bigoted and call for harm to other people - that is their goal. Everything else is just a setup play.

Anomander, (edited )
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Carefully, on a case-by-case basis; and the community.

It's not nearly as complicated as it seems on the surface - and you're trying to make any definition of "nazi" as complicated as possible, because you're wanting to delegitimize any rejection of nazis or nazi speech.

Remember how you said you don't care if people like you, you just want to push your topics on other people?

it diminishes its significance and undermines your credibility.

No one cares if the Nazis think they're "credible" or not. Each and every one of them will tell you they're not a nazi and they 'hate' nazis - while defending themselves and their nazi buddies from critique by insisting the label for their ideology is, for example, "cheapened" if applied to anyone who is not a card-carrying, armband-wearing, farcical exaggeration of stereotypical Nazis in full Reich dress regalia.

They always send the clean cut, quiet, polite one in first. And that guy puts a foot in the door, argues that their pals aren't really nazis, and that everyone in the room are the real baddies for judging those other guys unfairly - and tries to pry the door wider so their Nazi buddies can come in. Sure enough, every time, you let enough nazis in the room and the room is a nazi space now - so the whole gang of them don't have to pretend at being polite non-nazis anymore. The polite veneer, the deep care for "debate", and "respect for all viewpoints"? Those are all just tools, trying to whitewash and re-legitimize an ideology whose end goal is harming other people.

Notice how I'm casually referring to you like you're one of them? That's not some wokist over-use of the term. You're standing here defending them, you're trying to shove a foot in the door for them, laying down apologia for their views and their right to share them - you've spent like a week around the Fediverse arguing against any actions that have served to limit Nazis access to polite and adult spaces within the Fediverse as a whole. I don't care what you believe about yourself, or your views, or your ideology.

If you're going to stand with Nazis, if you're going to stand for them, consistently and repeatedly - don't get all offended and playact at being victimized when people assume that you are a member of the group you chose to stand with.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Good luck with your quest. May you find that place eventually.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

What is the cost of free health care? Where is it paid for?

Taxes.

Except that you guys are paying retail + markup + profit for the investors + "we have a monopoly" fees + "lol, your other option is dying" surcharge.

We just buy healthcare at-cost and wholesale.

I pay like $2K a year in taxes towards healthcare. $2K invested in a socialized healthcare system buys services, service time, and supplies that would cost an American hundreds of thousands of dollars when paying for them as an induvial in a for-profit healthcare system.

Yeah. Sometimes I pay for healthcare I don't use. Sometimes there are inefficiencies in the system. It is not a perfect system. But it's also not making anyone go bankrupt due to a medical emergency.

Paying $100K just to save $2K is never going to be good math, no matter how creative we get with the accounting.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

You're aligning yourself with nazis while engaging in sophistry to pretend that neither you nor they are nazis.

All these wild mental gymnastics to explain how it's not like that, or the farcical posturing of academic exactitude and "nuanced understanding" - those are the exact same shit as nazis sending in the quiet well-spoken guy to break the ice and get a foot in the door.

You're doing triple overtime to figure out ways to argue compassion for cryptofascists and nazi sympathizers, while going even further out of your way to avoid having the faintest shred of empathy for people who simply want nothing to do with any of that bullshit.

You can call them whatever you want. You don't get to demand that we call them what you want us to. You don't get to demand that we ignore your choice to align yourself with them, to defend them, and to try and make their views sound more palatable and more reasonable than their end goals.

Since everyone is so happy with misusing the term, what are we going to call ACTUAL nazis so that we can differentiate people you disagree with and ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS.

I completely understand that you absolutely refuse to get it and will continue to avoid getting it forevermore - but I'm going to say it for the rest of the room anyways.

Those guys are the "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS".

They just understand that pretending that they're not is the only way to get through the door of spaces dominated by the reasonable mainstream they'd like to sell their ideology to. They know that the reasonable mainstream wants nothing to do with "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS" so the "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS" dress up as the people you're currently defending and trying to make this conversation about. And anyone in that group that you're trying to defend the nazis by pointing towards, any single person among them who doesn't want to stand with nazis - changes where they stand so that they're not with the nazis anymore. You're staying still while trying to defend that decision.

The "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS" don't dress up in SS Uniforms and 'heil' each other in the comments sections - they pretend to be reasonable mainstream people and in order to present their views and their talking points wrapped in rhetoric that masks its nazi roots. They want to win over the mainstream, they want to convince people they're "on to" something, they want to exploit our willingness to engage in discourse to sell their views and advance their ideology. They are not here to engage in debate - the debate is merely a vehicle towards seizing power and then acting out an ideology of violence and hatred.

I'm not 'playing semantics' - I'm not even engaging with yours.

We are not going to split hairs and massage academic definitions until "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS" aren't actually nazis anymore. Either you're a useful idiot and not qualified to try and talk down on folks about the intricate semantics of "nazi" - or you're actually on their side.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

So "transition treatments" have gone up 4000% ... in the time period following the treatment becoming available. If being a gymnast was illegal until 2009, or nobody had invented a trampoline until then, you can certainly bet making it legal or possible to do floor routines would result in a 4000%+ increase in people who were openly and publically gymnasts.

Trans people, trans kids, have always existed - we just didn't have the technology to provide the treatment in that article.

That article is choosing to cite the numbers on the treatment rather than the condition because the treatment's very recent launch means it allows the presentation of a scarier number.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Effectively, what Spellblade is to Fighter, Dance Bard is to Monk. Plus buff sharing.

Ocean Druid has some cool stuff, but I always feel like "of the sea" or similar classes wind up kind of wasted. I don't think I've ever had a campaign spend enough time in or around large amounts of water to make a water-specialist class worthwhile. You can like, bypass the random swimming puzzle at the bottom of a dungeon somewhere, and the sidequest to magic pirate island has some nice utility - and then for the entire rest of the campaign you're on dry land, fighting land-based enemies, and the sea-themed subclass is mostly just flavour rather than mechanically useful.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

It’s like the custom stat benefits rule from Tasha’s. On its face, seems like a good idea. But now you just have every race being a reskin of each other. Kill the subclass. Embrace class differences. Let players make their characters unique based on the stories we make together, not trying to fit them into a predefined cookie cutter box.

This is so bizarrely self-contradictory.

Force players to only play the nine classes with no subclasses or features, force species into hard-locked stat differences ... to avoid them being cookie-cutter? Like forcing anyone who wants to play a reasonably-optimized STR character to play a species with inherent STR bonus increases creativity somehow? As if using Tasha's rule to play an unconventional species as a STR class means that player somehow cannot possibly also give their character a unique and interesting story as well as a slightly unconventional class/species combo? Make it make sense.

If you think that having more tools to customize and differentiate species and classes reduces creativity, that's a you problem and not a rules problem.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Please, tell me what I think some more. It went so well here.

You’re falling into the trap that 5e sets of assuming what is on the character sheet it’s all that’s available to the characters. By forcing players into subclasses that are all just cookie cutter variations of each others, you’re encouraging players to stay entirely in their sheet. To approach every problem by first looking to their sheet and trying to find the right number instead of creatively looking at the narrative we’re building together and finding a unique solution.

None of this is true. It's a weird strawman that you've made up, that would make absolutely no sense to any real person's opinion - if you weren't trying to create a fictional scenario where having more diversity of choice and options was somehow bad.

It’s not a “me” problem to acknowledge that 5e subclasses and races are incredibly samey mechanically,

It's absolutely a 'you' problem to see a wide variety of options with very few mechanical constraints, and go "yeah, that limits creativity" - if you feel your creativity is somehow enhanced by having hard mechanical limits on which races and classes can do what tasks in a TTRPG ... you can still create that experience for yourself in 5E. Like, having more options doesn't prevent you from playing however confined and restricted you want - so making all of these points about me, about other people is just projecting your own limitations on the rest of the world and then criticizing them for a problem only you seem to have.

and if you can’te see past the matrix and pretty illustrations WOTC uses to distract from that, that’s a you problem, for not really getting how this game works at the fundamentals.

Like that. That's not my opinion, "pictures" aren't why I have my opinion or why I might have the opinion I don't, and I definitely understand the mechanics more than fine. You just made up an opinion for me, made up an explanation why I might have that fictional opinion, and then got snide with me about an entirely fictional scenario you put on me.

You can just not use Tashas if you want. Imagining that other people need hard-coded stat penalties just to "be creative" and that's somehow impossible in a system where you, or they, can still choose to have hard-coded stat penalties is just the wildest thing to pretend is 'wrong' with D&D.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

A lot of social sciences is about generating and constructing data to prove something that seems obvious to most casual observers.

Part of why is cases like this - that despite it seeming evident to many folks, there are many others who insist that poor people are to blame for being poor, and bad individual decision-making is the only reason that poverty exists.

What was the subreddit that represented to you the best example of downspiral of quality? To me it was /r/dataisbeautiful (kbin.social)

At first it was all about presenting data in an original looking way. In the end it was about pushing political ideas in your throat using a plain bar graph. It was not about sharing something interesting you found but about taking advantage of a captive audience.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Sometimes people want to talk about their shit with people who can directly relate to it, and would prefer if people who can't relate aren't invited to the conversation.

I'm a man but I just would not be interested in that specifically.

There is a gap between "I'm not interested" and "I refuse to understand why someone else would be interested" that's not really acknowledged here but is important to be able to engage with.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

Admin realized that despite all the applications, there were:

  • People requesting the subreddit so they could continue the protests.
  • People requesting the subreddit so they could give it back to the original mods.
  • People requesting the subreddit so they could own it.
  • People requesting the subreddit because they have strong feelings about "moderation" and want to /worldpolitics it.
  • Absolutely no one who wanted to just do what the old mods did.

From what I could see, there no actual good-faith requests from people who genuinely cared about /TIHI and wanted to moderate it well and diligently. And like, who's surprised? It's a huge subreddit without a concrete community core, it's more of a content category. I don't think anyone except the mods cared about the community itself, because there barely was one.

That's the same issue they're running into with the other large subs. They're too huge and too general and everyone is just another face in the crowd, so there are very few people who care about that specific space in the way that makes for good volunteer moderators - in most cases, when those people existed for those communities, they were already recruited into the old mod team.

And all the people who want to mod are either activists for the protest, the sort of power-hungry weirdos that end up as powermods, but who showed up to Reddit too late, or somebody with an axe to grind about moderation in general seeing an opportunity in the massive unmoderated subreddit.

Anomander,
@Anomander@kbin.social avatar

That person had effectively no mod experience, but was already on the moderator list there - having been added by the old team.

Head mod chose to reopen under protest by turning off anti-scam bots and similar - letting sub continue to function visibly the same, but without the bot-supported protection it had used prior. He somehow talked his way onto the team during the protests, and then went to Admin and arranged to oust the head mod who had shut down the bots and was doing protest stuff in the sub.

He has since been returned to the bottom of the mod hierarchy there, for whatever that's worth.


Like, I kind of get that guy's point in some senses - simply turning off security features that quietly protect users, without announcing it, sure seems like the kind of thing that would hurt users pretty quick - without ever affecting site Admin. Especially when the head mod who shut down those bots wasn't the user/mod who was responsible for them, it's not 'their' bot if they're gonna go home and take their toys, as it were.

Staging a coup and getting Admin to put him at the top of the modlist is hyper shitty, and Admin's decision to promote someone who wasn't really part of that community to that sort of position is utterly inexplicable if we were trying to square their actions with their stated values.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • uselessserver093
  • Food
  • aaaaaaacccccccce
  • test
  • CafeMeta
  • testmag
  • MUD
  • RhythmGameZone
  • RSS
  • dabs
  • KamenRider
  • TheResearchGuardian
  • KbinCafe
  • Socialism
  • oklahoma
  • SuperSentai
  • feritale
  • All magazines