My favorite example of this.

Hint: George Lucas has stated in the most plain-English unambiguous terms that the empire does in fact represent US imperialism in A New Hope. It’s in a director chat interview thing with with James Cameron if you feel like searching it up.

It’s weird how much effort you have to put into convincing people that the team who lost had a bad strategy…

As an American, I don’t understand how anyone can be proud of our “founding principles” without also being deeply ashamed of our failure to live up to them. It fucking hurts to live with this much hypocrisy, and I’m not the one getting snatched off the fucking street. Better just keep absorbing as much info as possible lest I feel guilty for ignoring it…

I play video games, but my “identity” as a “gamer” is not important enough to me to care about defending the label.

If someone says “gamers are trash,” you either know exactly the type of person they’re talking about, or you are the type of person they’re taking about.

I have no desire to argue “well I’m a gamer and I’m not like those people” because I don’t give a damn about the “sanctity” of such an arbitrary label. Also, not only are there tons of toxic gamers who are guilty of all the -isms, but there are also a lot of gamers who are all-to-eager to minimize the shitty actions of the former group and I don’t want to be associated with them either.

“That’s just how online gaming is” or “You think that’s bad? You should’ve seen call of duty lobbies back in the day” are common refrains from people who may not be hyper-toxic themselves, but they’re completely adjusted to bigotry being the status quo for the hobby and they don’t even see it as a problem to be corrected.

Also, I’m white. Seeing people criticize racism in gamer culture and jumping to the defense of the label as if that’s the problem feels very on brand for the way that white people tend to prioritize things. The bigotry is a much bigger problem than my “right” to call myself a gamer without the extra baggage. It feels a bit like still trying to defend twitter. I play video games, but yes, gamers are trash.

One detail I’m still not fully clear on is how widespread the effects are. Say an instance uses the tesseract frontend. Does that mean that everyone who accesses lemmy via that instance was having all of this filtering applied? Does it only apply if they were accessing it via the web? If they logged into the same instance via a smartphone app, would it still be applying all of the hidden tesseract filters?

The superiority of homegrown tomatoes is like THE universally agreed upon gardening fact that everyone who’s ever had a garden knows. People go their whole lives thinking they don’t like tomatoes or that they taste bland and then they try a homegrown one and they’re like “Wow, that’s what this is supposed to taste like?”

I’m just glad I actually got it right. I was mostly typing up that comment just to make sure that my understanding was correct. I wasn’t even thinking at the time that it would be helpful to others as well. I guess I’ve been kind of assuming that everyone else on lemmy already understood how all of this stuff works. Happy to help!

“No CGI” is primarily dishonest marketing hype that actively minimizes the work of talented artists. Yes, they had a puppeteer steering a plastic ball around for Project Hail Mary, but they also replaced 100% of the practical ball with CG. Especially at a time when people are so opposed to AI because it devalues human art, I think it’s important to be aware of the other ways we devalue art that have nothing to do with AI.

This fantastic YouTube series done by a career FX artist does an excellent job of dispelling the marketing hype and recalibrating the conversation around CGI in movies.

I kept thinking of Wishbone when watching the Odyssey, and I didn’t realize until the next day that the reason why is that Wishbone was the first time I’d ever heard the story. My original Odysseus was a dog.

Guess it’s time I learned how to grill seitan.

This controversy over tesseract finally got me to do a bit more reading to understand how federation actually works and what a frontend does. Now I understand why everyone is so pissed.

The email metaphor has been the most useful to me in understanding how this works. Someone tell me if I’ve got this right. Basically, you have your lemmy account, which belongs to the instance you created it on, like how a gmail account belongs to Google. You can use whatever frontend you like to view your feed, just like you could use Outlook to view your Gmail account. Tesseract is a frontend, kinda like Outlook in the metaphor. In theory, a frontend should deliver to you everything that would appear on your lemmy instance no matter where you access it from, but now the tesseract frontend is basically making content filtering decisions about what users, topics, and instances you have access to. It would be like if your Outlook app suddenly decided “ew, you shouldn’t be using your Gmail to talk to any of those yahoo mail people, and also it’s now forbidden to use Outlook to discuss seahorses.”

So all the posts, users, and instances are still there, it’s just that the dev of your frontend decided that you shouldn’t interact with those users or discuss those topics anymore. Worse still, they surreptitiously tried to hide all of this new filtering among other features that are needed for spam and whatnot, leading people to think something was actually broken.

Do I have that right?

I’m literally about to go cook some regular bacon right now, but this is completely true in my book. I’ve had some pretty good vegan bacon before, but I don’t know what brand it was.

Just eating it by itself was only like mostly still pretty good in my book, but on a BLT or inside some pancakes, I’d be completely fine just switching. Actually, I’m gonna try to find out what kind it was.

Edit: It was MorningStar Farms veggie bacon. To anyone that thinks all vegan bacon is trash, I’d recommend you give it a try

I remember a YouTuber I follow breaking into a raid shadow legends bit, clearly taking the piss and pretending they’d actually sponsored the video.

It took me like a full 15 seconds to realize that it was just a real sponsored segment. They were just reading it with so much sarcasm that it came across like a bit. Don’t think they ever got that sponsorship again after that.

Idk, I could probably bear to hear about him exactly one more time after he gets sent to prison.

I saw a movie last weekend and there was an ad before the film for tiktok. The ad was super “wholesome” and about this dude who I’m sure is legitimately a great guy. He uploads “Dad” lessons on things like tying a tie and whatnot.

I couldn’t help but think that both US political parties were in lock-step just a few years ago that tiktok was a national security threat because it was a vector for foreign propaganda. Now that the American side of tiktok is owned by Larry Ellison, it’s not only no longer a “national security threat,” it’s a wholesome place where you can find trusted information from real people who are doing it just because they care.

It made me wanna puke.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. At nearly 3hrs runtime, I went in thinking “as long as I don’t hit a point where I’m wondering how much time is left, I’ll be satisfied with this movie.” I was pretty gripped the entire time. Never once felt like it was dragging.

Wherever this thing ends up, it will be begging for the most obvious bit of vandalism ever. One little hole turns it from a “touching tribute” into a real-life kirkpost.

“I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach”

- Upton Sinclair

“Fuck it, aim for the stomach!”

- canvas contributors