Though largely ineffective, the Houthi attacks have been able to disrupt shipping and keep the U.S. and its allies tied down, frustrating the Navy’s decades-old mission of keeping open the region’s critical sea lanes.
“Though largely ineffective, the attacks have done everything they were supposed to do.”
Your teacher gave you a failing grade just because of commas? That’s a little over-the-top, in my opinion.
And thanks! It’s been a miserable slog, I’m going to be so glad to be done with it! Congrats on finishing yours too, even though it was awhile ago!
Haha, yeah, exactly. Exactly that
Why do I use so many commas when writing? I’m editing my dissertation (it’s really, truly, finally almost done this time, hooray!) and consistently the editing I need to do is removing like half the commas in every sentence. It’s actually hilarious, at this point, just, how many, extra commas, there are, everywhere.
Absolutely. Look at the forward-most kid whose arm just straight up becomes the lady’s hair.
I’m one of the few weirdos who actually loves Demon of Hatred. For whatever reason his tells are just so much more legible to me than just about any other Sekiro boss and I like the rhythm of the fight. Also, you can parry him a surprising amount! Parrying his stomps feels awesome once you figure out the timing. He definitely has some really, really bullshit moves, but I’ve found that if you’re right up in his crotch he almost never uses the extreme bullshit moves. It’s still a very long fight and when you die halfway through his third health bar it fucking suuuuucks, but I dunno, overall I really like the fight!
It doesn’t look ai generated to me. All the dinosaur back plates are where they should be, the hands we can see look reasonable, there’s no eldritch horror of mushed together background pieces the computer hallucinated. I have no idea where this image comes from, but I’m fairly confident it isn’t ai
This ties back to why I struggle to find any fiction I want to read anymore. After so many hundreds of novels the plots are stale and so many stories just unselfconsciously re-tread contemporary misery.
This is a problem I have too. I can predict most plot twists usually fairly accurately, and I’m extremely sick of most (recent) views of dystopic futures. They’re just stale because I’ve read too many. My antidote has been, oddly enough, older works. Ray Bradbury is surprisingly good (much of the time) and even when I predict a twist, the characters are so well written I don’t really mind. I also have been meaning to read more Philip K Dick. I read Ubik recently and absolutely loved it. It was weird and unsettling and uncomfortable. It’s set in a future dystopia, but because of when it was written, it’s not the kind of future dystopia I’m so incredibly sick of. The literal nickel-and-diming by the protagonist’s appliances in his apartment cracked me up and felt so different from the kinds of over-monetization you get in so much fiction about future dystopias. I also still like Asimov. His stuff is too hopeful to be realistic, you can really tell he was writing at a time when the idea of sentient robots was new and people had hope that such things would be helpful for humanity rather than harmful. And his background misogyny is, uh, a bit unpleasant, shall we say. And yet, I dunno, there’s something really compelling about many of Asimov’s works, even as they feel a little infantile and also reactionary in certain ways.
“Death to America” means death to the american state. It does not mean kill everyone who happens to reside within the geographic borders claimed by the american state. Come on, this is basic first day understanding what words mean shit.
But what if we grow? What if more people pirate?
Good. Unlimited piracy on media and software corporations.
I’m a communist first and foremost. Private property is wrong in all its forms, this wrongness is just most obvious when talking about intellectual property, because intellectual property can be easily copied and isn’t something physical like the tools in a factory. Of course corporations will always try to clamp down on piracy, they’ve been trying to do so my entire adult life. It doesn’t really matter how many pirates there are, because corporations don’t just want money, they want all the money. If even one person pirates, corporations will try to make piracy difficult.
I guess I fundamentally disagree with your statement that “The world can handle a stable population of pirates.” I don’t think that’s a meaningful statement. It’s not like there’s some “carrying capacity” for piracy after which point the intellectual property ecosystem will tip out of equilibrium and cause pirates to become an endangered species.
Nah, it’s way easier than that: pirate everything, give as much money as you can afford to small creators. Intellectual property is a fuck and the vast majority of any money you pay for media goes directly into the pockets of wealthy executives, not to the people who actually make the media you enjoy.
I’m reading all the Dune books again (just finished 5). The thing that strikes me this time around is that Frank Herbert should have read some communist theory and some queer theory. A far-future society where fucking everyone is cis and straight? I don’t buy it. And feudalism is the economic/social system that makes the most sense? I don’t buy that either. But I don’t know what I expect, the guy (Frank Herbert) clearly believes wholeheartedly that history is driven by a select few people and the mass of humanity don’t matter. He’s also pretty into eugenics. It’s really annoying, actually. It just doesn’t strike me as very good or interesting sci-fi. I’d sum up the premise of the Dune books as “What if hundreds of thousands of years from now humans had done eugenics enough that some people can literally see the future?” And like, ok, the literally seeing the future stuff is interesting, and I think the role of prophecy in these books is pretty cool, but once Leto II dies, prophecy and prescience just go out the window as plot devices, and we’re left with Miles Teg turning into The Flash (because of his Atreides genes, it’s so fucking full of eugenics I hate it) and the Honored Matres who use sex as a ridiculously potent weapon, but they’re bad for doing so, at least according to the Bene Gesserit. And what’s up with that? It really feels like the Bene Gesserit use sex as a weapon too, but I guess it’s more correct to say they use sex as a tool in order to do eugenics better. They’re into it for breeding reasons, whereas the Honored Matres are into it for controlling men reasons. Oh, and the Tleilaxu are another power player, but you know what? I’m not even going to get into their whole deal (extremely misogynist, unless I’ve seriously misread something).
It’s all silly and annoying and I don’t think Frank Herbert is as deep as he thinks he is and I wish he had thought about politics and sexuality from a few more perspectives (specifically, a communist one and a queer one, respectively). I think this series would be better with more emphasis on the mass of common people who have to live in this deeply fucked up universe and any recognition that non-procreative sex (especially gay sex) exists and is cool and good.
I’m probably not going to read these stupid books again once I finish them this time. Well, maybe I’ll read the first three again at some point, because that’s where the questions I find interesting are explored. (Mostly the seeing the future stuff. How do you live a life if you can see the future? What if the future you see is horrific? Should you fight against it? Can you even do so?)
It really isn’t. One and three aren’t even the same gestures and two is such a common gesture, I’ve done it this week. It’s literally 
Thanks for the response, legitimately. I haven’t done enough reading and thinking to have a principled position on sex work. I really don’t know where I stand. I really should read more about and by sex workers, because these issues are indeed important.
I do want to say that I haven’t actually seen leftists wanting prostitution for the same reasons as incels. I’m not saying this doesn’t happen, I’m sure it does in some circles and I’m certainly not trying to cast doubt on your assertions that you’ve seen it. I believe you have. But I haven’t, not from people I’d class as reasonable leftists. Part of this, of course, is I just don’t go out in public much or talk to very many people, and when I do, the topic of sex work doesn’t come up. So you and I have very different experiences with the types of people we’ve seen defend sex work, and I think that difference is relevant here. I think I’m much more likely than you to assume that someone I see arguing a pro-sex-work position is doing so not because they’re reactionary or misogynist, but actually from a place of genuine feminism. Because those are the kinds of defenses I’ve seen most often, including in this very thread. Also, and this is a small thing, but unless I’ve missed someone, none of the people talking to you about sex work in this thread are cis men. So yeah, this thread is a total exception to the general rule that people defending sex work are mostly cis men.
Another very small thing I disliked about the first comment of yours I responded to is the line “Orgasms do not increase productive forces.” I don’t believe labor must necessarily exist for the sole purpose of increasing productive forces. Art, conversation, hell, even cooking a nice meal are all examples of labor that doesn’t increase productive forces. So to say that sex work is bad because orgasms are unnecessary, well, I just don’t think that follows. I don’t really see how that argument is any different to the argument that says a barista isn’t really a worker just because they’re not producing something.
Ultimately, I don’t know if this conversation is worth continuing much longer. I haven’t done enough thinking and reading to say anything beyond what I’ve said, so I think I’ll probably bow out here. I mostly commented to point out the unfortunate reality that so many people on the internet make the (shitty, sexist) assumption that everyone they’re interacting with is a straight man. And I want that assumption to die already. I admit I did slightly misread your initial comment and I see now that you weren’t exactly making that assumption, I just read my own shit into what you were saying. You’re also proudly ML (I can’t fault you for that), but since I’m coming from hexbear, the fairly extreme anti-anarchist sentiment in your first paragraph was a bit off-putting. But hey, that’s fine, this thread is on lemmygrad, not hexbear.
Sorry, much of this response is me trying to work through what I found off-putting about your initial comment. There’s likely not a lot worth engaging with here. Still, I’m going to post it because I’ve spent 10 minutes writing it. (I need to stop procrastinating the actual work I need to be doing today! Life is hard!)
I’ve been marinating on your response here. There’s something off about it that I’m having trouble putting words to. I think maybe the “offness” that I’m sensing is that your comment sort of treats men as humans and everyone else as potential trafficking victims. I don’t think you meant to do this, I suspect (hope) you don’t actually believe that non-men are not human in the same way men are, but this comment of yours still kind of reads like that.
For instance, you end it with the following line:
Fix your attitude toward women, and get a girlfriend, ya horny losers.
This line really rankles, for two reasons. One, there are women who have read your comment and it just feels weird to tell a woman, especially a marxist woman, to fix her views toward women. Two, there are people who have read your comment who don’t want a girlfriend, because they’re not into women, because they have a long-term partner already and are monogamous, or because they’re ace or aromantic. (Probably other reasons too.) And yet, here you are, implicitly acting like everyone reading your comment is a straight man. But we aren’t. I’m not. The people arguing with you in this thread about sex work aren’t. You’ve made an incorrect (and sexist) assumption about the people reading your comment.
I love lemmy, having been here since the very earliest hexbear days. In my view, the devs are doing the best they can. They’re a tiny team surviving on grants, trying to produce software that the users, for some reason, expect to have feature parity with reddit, a large corporation with a large paid dev team. It’s weird to say the least.
My understanding is that nutomic and dessalines survive solely on that 4000 euros per month, because all of their time goes to lemmy. How do you want them to survive? They need to eat and pay rent, you know. The real world exists and they’re humans in it, needing food and sleep and shelter.
It seems to me you want magic. You don’t want the lemmy devs to be humans, you want them to be magic coder gods who are infinitely patient, with boundless time and energy. But that’s completely unrealistic, you surely must see that, right?
There’s a pinned post at the top of this very comm talking about exactly this issue: https://hexbear.net/post/403920?scrollToComments=false
Long story short, yes, it’s a racist term with a racist history and should not be used. Please change it
I’ve had several fully vegan fortresses. The issue is that idiot dwarves get one of their stupid moods and decide they’ll die if I don’t provide them with animal bones or leather or something. I’ve lost dwarves this way, so now I buy animal products from caravans to avoid it. It’s a shame, really, I wish I could convince my dwarves they don’t need to make bone necklaces, we have so many gems and silver and all kinds of things that make better crafts than animal bones!
Haha, he’s like 60, a real seasoned alcoholic. He’ll probably live forever, unfortunately. You’d think riding a motorcycle home from a bar would indeed be a death sentence, but I fear not in this case
I’d suggest godot instead of unity. Godot is open source and quite powerful, unity is proprietary and might decide someday to charge you every time someone downloads your game. (Unity floated this already, leading to a huge backlash so they walked it back, but that suggests to me that they want to do it and are testing the waters but ultimately decided to put that particular money grab on hold, for the moment. Godot will never do something like that, because it’s open source.)