It comes and goes, really, along with other forms of hate.

Things get nakedly bad, which galvanizes people to organize and rise up and push back, the libs and cons get together to say "Whoah those people over there sure are hateful, let’s put a new holiday on the calendar and pass a law that says “hey you’re not allowed to officially discriminate against this group (wink)”, the capitalists pop champaign and celebrate their inclusiveness, things seem slightly less bad for a few weeks, then the extremists get pissed off about the tolerance of those groups, the elites use their anger as an excuse to neuter the (already basically meaningless) protections, the chuds celebrate this as a win and use that as a rallying cry to organize and recruit, and saying anything about it means you are either ignorant or an extremist because “there’s already laws protecting those people! There’s no laws protecting my way of life! (all of the other laws)”. Things get worse again, but now chuds are emboldened because they knew all along they were going to get their way like a child screaming for oreos at the grocery store.

Sometimes after a few hundred years things get marginally better! (on the surface)

I mean tbh I’ve been saying all along this is the kinda shit I want AI to be doing. Let it examine and compare thousands of pictures of my dookie so that the manual dookie-watchers can go out and retrain as artists.

I mean surely, this kind of thing will result in an overall improvement in our society and not just like, warehouses full of marginalized people flipping through millions of dookie pics a day while getting paid piece-work rates well below minimum wage while draining several nuclear reactors worth of power just so that The Company can bill this service as “AI” and some tech bros that made their millions on the dot Com crash and crypto scams can look at their weekly dookie-score and go, “huh, 6.8 this week. Guess I should eat some more grape nuts” (but they actually don’t even). Definitely not that.

About to do a Winston draft this weekend with my BiL. 3pk Crimson Vow, 3pk Karlov Manner, which feels like a reasonable thematic match (and it’s what I’ve got laying around). Plus a few promo packs thrown in for extra spice.

Very excited! Haven’t been able to go draft for real for a few months since my latest child was born.

Hoping to pull a Sorin for the wifey while we’re at it.

Yeah it was pretty much this.

“He said he’ll flatten it!”

What, like as opposed to the dems, who will write a very strongly worded letter after the bombs they send over are used to flatten the place?

"Well yeah at least they’re writing that letter! Better than no letter! "

Yeah I was about to make a similar post - just had a big debate with some older family friends at a party my parents had that are die-hard dems (which was nice, as they’re way further left then most other people there).

They were aghast when I said I wasn’t voting blue, and had no idea who Claudia or the PSL are, of course.

Got a lot of “this is the most important election ever” and “if he wins democracy is over” of course. But the one that really chapped my biscuits was saying that if he wins, then [my family member] will lose access to reproductive health care and IVF in particular.

So I said yeah right, neither side is going to change a damn thing about that, because they both see it as way too valuable of a carrot/stick to give up campaigning and fundraising on it. If the dems care so much about it, why haven’t they actually done anything about it?

“Well Biden’s wanted to, but he’s been hamstrung by the extremist right!”

So what about those years when he had full congressional majority?

“Oh well yeah, I mean I guess he could have done more there…”

And then we got called away to the rest of the party and never got to continue.

Bonus points for my insistence that both parties intend on continuing the genocide - but ofc he is going to do it worse somehow. When I said I’m not going to vote for Genocide Light™️, they said, “Hell yeah I am! It’s better than the other option!”, and I sadly beat a dead horse a little more about there actually being more options available and maybe you actually don’t have to put your stamp of approval on genocide-with-rainbow-flag-characteristics.

Also bonus-bonus points for one of the two (very sweet, kickass person generally) asking “So what does genocide mean again?” in a completely honest, non-hostile way, indicating that they simply had not engaged with even the thought of such a thing happening before this conversation.

And these are the two that always get in trouble for being too vocal about their left-ish political opinions at these functions.

I’ve had both over the last few years, and while the cooking experience is not all that different tbh, the one thing that bugs me about my current glass-top electric stove is that the surface is so flat that my ever-so-slightly warped carbon steel pan doesn’t sit flat and rocks all over the place and doesn’t heat evenly. I’ve basically been unable to use it since moving here, and it’s my favorite pan. :(

But if I had my choice, I’d ofc go induction, but between the other two I’d still go electric, just for the fumes alone. But I’ll probably be way less hot on the idea of glass-tops in the future, that’s for sure.

I’ve had both over the last few years, and while the cooking experience is not all that different tbh, the one thing that bugs me about my current glass-top electric stove is that the surface is so flat that my ever-so-slightly warped carbon steel pan doesn’t sit flat and rocks all over the place and doesn’t heat evenly. I’ve basically been unable to use it since moving here, and it’s my favorite pan. :(

But if I had my choice, I’d ofc go induction, but between the other two I’d still go electric, just for the fumes alone. But I’ll probably be way less hot on the idea of glass-tops in the future, that’s for sure.

Really such a bizarre way to word a policy initiative.

Like, “oh we need to give billions in bank bailouts in order to protect the wealth of all the _[black] hedge fund managers! See! We’re doing this for racial justice!”

I mean I guess? Seems like the people you’d want to be blocking in the first place are the exact type of people you’d expect to have a whole clown car full of obnoxious burner accounts in the first place. And FB and IG make more sense because those accounts are (at least theoretically) real id linked - you’re not supposed to be able to just go make more accounts on a whim, and you’re setting the privacy on posts to only show to mutuals. Just seems like the flimsiest protection imaginable.

And yeah obvs bellend does this stuff to help his impressively stupid followers, and it’s definitely dumb, but I’d be a thousand percent surprised if he hasn’t made the engineers over there work insane overtime hours just to hardcore his account with godmode viewing and posting powers. Hell, we saw the code for white(!)-listed hate speech filter bypass for him and his buddies, so they’re clearly not above it.

Just seems like a really surface level thing to worry about that doesn’t really affect any degree of safety or privacy. Still, stupid, yes.

I think someone just had a goofy meme idea and a made a silly, and then it stuck because it looks silly and lessens the pain of having to see that daft bastard’s crufty mug again.

Already more thought than that turd-through-a-playdoh-spaghetti-machine-for-brains dork-waffle deserves, tbqh.

: “something something context of everything before you or whatever”

: “oh bet?”

Maybe I’m missing something, but I’ve found it very strange the concern over this change. I mean, it’s only for public posts, which they could see if they just logged out or switched to a burner account anyways? Like, if it let them send a message or comment on posts, or see posts for followers only or something, I’d see the issue, but it doesn’t seem like that aspect of the feature was all that meaningful anyways. Am I wrong?

I mean I assume if it’s a big public priority of it’s probably something terrible, so there must be more to it than how I’m understanding it currently.

Just to clarify, they were uncropping a version that was just the top half of the original picture, so the differences were in the part it “reimagined”, not changing things that were already there (in what it was given).

Still, obviously, and I cannot stress this enough - yikes.

Haha I just got a side-eyed code comment the other day because I named a variable in a migration AffectedAsses (something about assessments).

“Let’s change this to not be crude” they said. Boo. I’m affecting all their asses with the next one.

Haha I literally read this line and thought, “Jesus who do you think you are, UlyssesT??”.

Anyways, welcome back brotherino.

I feel like all the magic has flowed down into the smaller regional burns at this point. Those are obviously hit or miss depending on your local scene, and you don’t get quite the same huge community pieces as the big burn, but there’s usually plenty enough to keep you busy just checking everything out for the whole event anyways, let alone a thousand times that if you really get involved with volunteering/organizing. Hell in a previous state I lived in, there were a few smaller local burns and then a bigger state-wide one, so even then you could kinda pick and choose how big and crazy of a thing you wanted to attend/do.

I need to start looking at local options around here…

My favorite line on this subject: only call the police when the situation would be improved by the addition of an easily frightened maniac with a gun.

That is to say, usually don’t.

Maybe! I don’t think it’s so much about blaming people for their own suffering, but more of a recognition that suffering is just another state of being, and in a larger context that being is a part of everything else that is.

In a broader sense I don’t think that mindfulness practice needs to directly lead to nihilism, but it certainly can without an underpinning of philosophy that can make sense of what’s left after dismissing the subjective as the only truth.

Much like the monk that remains seated while self-immolating, it is possible to remain mindful and even euphoric in even the most extreme forms of suffering, but that said it would be disgusting to try and proffer that example as a way to dismiss the suffering of others in a current state. “hey that guy could do it, so why don’t you just sit and be one and then you won’t have any problems?” Of course that is rediculous. But it is a practice that can lead to reduced suffering, and it is available to everyone. But it’s much like the tech bros that tell people suffering from poverty to “just learn to code”. Like yeah, it’s an option, and a thing that can help some people, but just because it’s a thing that worked for you doesn’t mean it’s going to fix everyone else’s problems, especially not right here in the now when that suffering is happening.

Anyways, your last line is real. It’s part of why I got off track of a regular practice years ago - it really did feel weird to be disconnected from people in that way. I felt like Dr Manhattan, being tired of these people and their problems, as goofy as that sounds. I’d like to think that’s not how everyone reacts, maybe that was just my young adult narcissism in action.

In another way though, it was almost like everyone in the world was on fire, and I had just jumped in a lake - why is everyone out there still running around screaming in pain, and insisting that I was the weird one for being wet?

There’s probably a balance there somewhere. I’m not really sure where I’m going with this lol, but I appreciate your viewpoint is what I’m trying to say.

They would be bald-ass stealing a Rick-n-Morty quote to make this useless point too, natch.