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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • The news certainly isn’t new, but there’s a difference between knowing something that is 99% likely to be true and having hard, factual evidence, and just having a formal report on it.

    We all know that Epstein didn’t kill himself. It was the most blatant political murder of the century. But there’s a difference between knowing Epstein didn’t kill himself, and a major investigatory body releasing a report that analyses all available information and confirms accurately and without bias, that Epstein didn’t kill himself.


  • I’ve had some issues with Invidious being unable to play specific videos once or twice, but the issues tend to go away after a couple of days.

    I mean, we know Google and Youtube are both multi-billion-dollar corporations that are absolutely enraged by the idea that there could be any possible way for a commoner pleb like you to NOT have your online experience absolutely crammed with as many privacy violations and hyper-targeted ads as possible. Invidious having to constantly stay ahead of such powerful entities’ attempts to block them out means that some errors and periods of downtime are perfectly excusable- what’s important is continuing to support them in their fight.





  • It’s pretty modern if you mean popular, although the idea itself is REALLY old.

    Rather than going into specific examples because there are a lot of them (especially in gaming and TV), I’d like to say my piece on cliches.

    Basically, cliches come to exist because the cliche trope is a really good idea.

    “The Butler did it” as a murder mystery trope is a fantastic idea because some people with too much money will use the protection money affords them to mistreat their employees, providing a great motive you can build on to create a great story with relatable morals and characters. It sets up a character with perfect motives, means and a reasonable position of trust to avoid suspicion.

    Similarly, “Hell good, Heaven bad” is a fantastic trope because it lets you step back and analyse things like the negative impacts of religion and how authorities (and the bible) will portray themselves as good regardless of their actual actions. Plus of course there were periods of time where people were told doing virtually anything that didn’t fit into an extremely narrow worldview meant you were going to hell. You know, stuff like basketball and Dungeons and Dragons.

    Now, the problem with cliches is when someone sees a popular idea that’s also a very good idea, but doesn’t understand why it was a good idea. As a result, when they use the idea, it rings hollow at absolute best, and that kind of terrible execution of something that’s already known and popular tends to be especially disappointing. I think the best example is The Hunger Games, which absolutely defined young adult dystopian fiction for years because it showed how the media industry mistreats its workers, and Alleigant, which used a lot of ideas from Hunger Games (and some other things) without actually understanding the ideas.

    (TLDR: Hunger Games has a love triangle as a prominent plot element, but the actual reason is that it’s perpetuated by the media pretty much on pain of death for Katniss so that she can entertain the viewers. By contrast, Alleigant also has a love triangle but the triangle IS the plot element and the author bends over backwards to make it happen despite the fact none of the characters really feel like they’re suitable for it)

    Anyways, cliches aren’t bad but you need to know how, why, and when to use them in order to actually fulfil their potential, and the heaven-hell one you’ve mentioned above is no exception.






  • Violins are traditional instruments of cinematic mourning, either as background melody or very famously used literally in Titanic where the orchestra kept playing right up until the ship went down (historically accurate).

    Spongebob Squarepants later had a one-off gag where Mr. Krabs wanted to express insincere mourning, so he pulled out a finger-size violin and said something to the effect of “Oh boo hoo. Let me play you a sad song on the world’s tiniest violin”

    Of course, being Spongebob Squarepants, the gag was executed so flawlessly that it was immediately seamlessly integrated into internet culture.


  • That’s great for the workers, but… is Boeing as a company just too far gone anyways? Even a gesture like this doesn’t seem like it could reverse the spiral they’ve fallen into…

    Brazenly assassinating whistleblowers, a notorious focus on moneymaking over public safety, rushing production in order to meet deadlines, self-certifications that are being found not to be up to industry standards, quality rejection by NASA, more whistleblowers citing safety violations on the new 777 that are so severe that it might be more cost-effective to just scrap all the planes than to totally disassemble them to fix the issues, and a complete exodus of talented workers who can pass on essential technical knowledge because driving them away was necessary in order to make all the Speed Over Safety stuff feasible…

    I certainly don’t envy anyone who’s been tasked with saving the rotten zombie husk of Boeing that’s shambling along only by the momentum it accrued while it was alive.