gattsuru
6hr ago
I would argue that No Man's Sky is an immersive sim (if not a very realistic one) and not a software toy, and conversely that Star Citizen is a software toy (no end game and progression exists almost entirely on player-defined axis) and an immersive sim (it has a defined world with specific spaces where they player exists entirely within a single avatar facing a systems-coherent simulation, makes you feel paranoid that you're missing out on lore/material if you don't search every corner).
I'm honestly not sure where I'd put Space Engineers there.
... the McMichaels recieved some minimal support.
To be fair, you yourself did have to fight against a few chuckleheads here, and more people who were willing to But Arbery Might Have Stolen Something Before. But, yeah, even among pretty extreme parts of the right-wing, the McMichaels were nowhere near the cause celebre that people imagine.
....Existence proven. That is quite the article; I haven't made it through the whole thing, and it took a while to get further than the subheader. @gattsuru, you might get a kick out of this. I might try and do a writeup for it.
Interesting, but I'll note that it doesn't actually call the fed actions Red tribe. Renfo says, instead:
"Humiliated on the national stage following the bloodshed at Ruby Ridge, federal law enforcement agencies “needed a big win,” one Davidian survivor noted. Although the ATF could have arrested Koresh with little fanfare on one of his regular jogs, the agency decided to go big with its February 1993 raid. A massive show of force, agents thought, would stun and incapacitate Koresh and his followers and help to rehabilitate the image of federal law enforcement. In reality, the well-armed Davidians were more than ready for a fight, and they delivered yet another black eye to federal agents."
And the book agrees :
The ATF got its search warrant. Thibodeau claims it was “not coincidental” that the agency had a congressional budget hearing coming up. “They looked like shit after Ruby Ridge. They needed a big win.”"
While there's a lot of lurid reviews of Cook's work as talking about the Red Tribe's devolution into 'conspiracy theorists' -- and Cook does spend nearly a third of the book on that -- the other two thirds of the book are split between talking about Koresh and the Davidians were fuckups (not always fairly) and how the feds fucked everything up. Which makes the contrast pretty awkward, given the extent the theorists were sometimes right, even in his telling.
That's far from an unbiased or neutral telling, especially if you're familiar with the finer details. Cook takes every Democratic party deflection at face value (and literally mentions Freeh once in the entire book, not merely believes that the Davidians lit the fire but so certain he quotes someone calling any other possibility barmy) to pretend the FBI was manipulating everyone around them, but he does at least mention some of the multitude of lies (no flammable CS gas until oops there was) and destroyed or lost evidence (the steel door and three disappearing cameras are mentioned, though not some other records), and the absolute atrocity of a show trial the surviving Davidians received.
But for all my criticisms, it's also not saying they were Red Tribe behaviors. Cook's story is that they're just The Feds.
I want to say someone making a more dedicated argument specifically about the raid 'really' starting with local Red-Tribe-On-Red-Tribe fighting, though I can't find it in my records and I'm pretty sure it was long enough ago it couldn't have been this specific article or book. The weakman is just that the investigations started under Bush I's ATF (just as Ruby happened before the 1992 election even happened), but that struggles with the extent these orgs were clearly trying to support major policies among the then-ascendant left side of the aisle. Steelman was something about the intra-Davidian battles getting pushed up to the state, and the state indirectly pushing them to the feds, and the feds were stuck holding the bill... but that still runs into the problem of how the feds actually handled things.
Do not confuse this for an argument that we Reds are not entirely willing and capable of coordinating similar violence; the difference is who we've generally aimed it at ("Are those Level Four plates?", "I didn't lose shit", "belt-feds are the only good feds", "the tree of liberty", etc), and the fact that we have drawn and enforced lines that keeps such lawless killing almost entirely (and, arguably, comically) theoretical.
I'd quibble that this is a moderately recent development: there were some parts of the early anti-abortion movement and anti- that were similarly bloodthirsty and tolerated, and it took a pretty sizable effort by both the more moderate bits of the religious right and some lawfare by leftists to shove it into a box. The Days of Rage did also have the MOOVE bombing and some amount of tolerated targeted violence that direction, even if it's often overstated by Zinnian tellings.
gattsuru
8hr ago
At least in vanilla, you're usually better served by exploring the outer islands directly instead of refighting the dragon -- a lot of the intent for multiple summonings is to handle multiplayer servers. That said, yeah, there's a lot of players that literally never do it, and another number that consider it where the game starts (since Elytra and Shulker boxes, both post-Ender Dragon, are incredibly useful for creative builders).
Modded can change that pretty aggressively, and it's common to lock 'end-game' or specialized crafting material specifically around the End Dragon's death (either as a direct drop, like old Tinker's Construct end dragon scales, or indirectly like Quark's Biotite). But then again modded will also have other end states, some just checkboxes (GTNH's final Stargate is literally useless by the time you can make it), and some more serious (completing Blightfall's last quest involves purifying the entire pregen map; you can still explore, but it's an entirely different style of play from what you were doing before).
gattsuru
10hr ago
To be fair, Toronto, rather than US, but pretty strong evidence.
You still see some of the old guard of gun control debates try it at times, both from the right (and 'right') and the left. SAF and NAGR done a decent job at slapping it out of their spokesmen, but the NRA still has some old guard that leap to it. Been more common with the post-Remington lawsuits, but generally not in ways intended for public consumption (or even to reach a jury).
EDIT... and that apparently includes the governor of Utah.
drawing a comparison between the brutal violence in Gaza which Charlie Kirk implicitly supported and the brutal violence which ended his own life.
"the chickens have come home to roost".
Nope.
EDIT: I absolutely expect to see overextension, here -- 'database of 40k+ incidents' and 'reasonable filtering and accuracy' are less venn diagrams and more completely separate circles -- but it's not very persuasive when the central examples inevitably look like this, instead of this.
gattsuru
2d ago
gattsuru
3d ago
There's also a bit of a magic trick where the professional will move the scope of the discussion to a field they've prepared heavily as part of their opening gambit. It's not limited to these sort of public oral debates, but once you catch the trick it's hard to miss how common it is, even if the actual slight-of-hand is pretty hard to imitate.
gattsuru
3d ago
Dayton, Ohio 2019 spree shooter. Very heavily themed his online presence around Canti and Atomsk.
gattsuru
3d ago
Barring bad soap operas, no. But prosecutors will want to bring witnesses, have to question the target, and (while I'd argue shouldn't) handle the media, and all those things are more expensive when the first question is 'did you know she had a dick'.
As with netstack, haven't gotten Silksong yet.
Trying to veg a bit with Star Citizen. It is, to skip to the punchline, an awful game, made all the worse by the staggering amounts of time and money that have gone into it. It's been in development over a decade and has yet to complete (or even seriously implement) a single gameplay loop, nine months into the 'year of playability' the server infrastructure still panics over moving boxes into the wrong location, and anyone who plays the game for long develops a paranoid fear of elevators; calling it half-finished is too complimentary by halves. I bought in back during the original kickstarter at one of the lowest tiers, but the game has increasingly focused both its marketing and its development on megaships marketed to whales, often to pretty ludicrous ends (eg, you can't buy an Idris even if you had a thousand bucks to waste, and even if you could, it makes absolutely no sense to own even as a way to grief people).
Which makes it all the more frustrating how good the core of the gameplay can be. The whole bit where you seamlessly blast out of a docking bay, start warping to a mission destination, leave the pilot chair to prep gear and a light motorbike in the bay, hear the decel as you get into orbit and drop out of quantum travel, fly down to the surface and land 20 klicks out dodging turrets, jump into the bike and go off to start busting heads with a rifle, and head back when done. Or you sculk around the edges of a pirate and PVP-heavy point-of-interest in your undergunned salvage ship, carefully managing ship power to avoid spiking anyone's sensors, to crack apart and chew down salvage left behind by their battles. Or you're on a ground mission and have to take quick cover because someone else is fighting a massive space battle and you can't risk eating a golden BB. Even just hauling cargo, tedious as it can be, still feels a lot more engaged than the standard Freelancer/No Man's Sky/Elite.
And then the mission system can't count to five, or you get killed by drinking a bugged soft drink, or you fall through two different floors of your ship at superluminal speeds and fuck your entire cargo and a few hundred thousand credits as it goes 50 gigameters that way. Or you do all that turret-dodging and crack a half-dozen heads, grab a mission objective, mount your hoverbike, and it shoots into outspace leaving you behind and literal hours of travel to get back to your ship. Or you look at your cargo run and realize that you're making fewer credits-per-hour than you would with VLRT missions, and this route involves dodging PVP pirates in heavy fighters while you're armed with a handheld tractor beam.
The technical implementation is challenging enough that some of this can be excused or handwaved: this giant scalable dynamically moving pile of microservices is probably necessary for the game's intended final scope even if it's almost exactly the sort of hypothetical I use to argue against the microservice of everything. But then there's other bugs that are incredibly simple model or stat errors and take literal months to fix, or parts of gameplay loops that just need a (client-side-only!) UI update. How do you have five hundred people working on a space game funded by selling ships and not have a way to sort ships in-game after ten years?
Space Engineers is my other mindless space game, as a more build-em-up. Recently dropped a survival gameplay update with some other decent tech fixes. There's some stuff to criticize -- combat is still hilariously floaty-feeling, whether two spacesuits with handguns or big capital ships, and the end-game prototech gameplay loop still feels kinda dumb a year later -- but there's still some amount of enjoyment in designing and building out a decent light frigate.
gattsuru
3d ago
Does anyone here recall seeing a “notices bulge” meme in the wild lately? Do modern trans people use it?
It's a really common furry/anti-furry thing, generally focused around M/M (or, more rarely, M/F) roleplay norms. By convention the person noticing the bulge is usually the femmy one. Given the demographics of the furry roleplay sphere some of the M/F stuff is probably trans people, but the specifics of the joke misalign enough to what most trans people are looking for that probably less than you'd expect. See this for a relatively sfw joke about it.
gattsuru
3d ago
When discussing tradeoffs, guys being able to look at porn at work isn't going to win against making it difficult for women to be employed there.
Is there a difference between this style of "tradeoff" and "that have been systematically stripped from and denied to myself and my allies for decades or more, and will never in any case be allowed to protect us in any way in the future"?
gattsuru
3d ago
First the violent nutjobs took FLCL references, and now they're taking the concept of getting rawwed by a werewolf in tight jeans. Is nothing sacred.
gattsuru
3d ago
The notices bulge one is a furry meme, rather than trans. (Not even girls-with-dicks side of furry, afaik; I've seen it more from the gay side, and not just in the sense that I would see more of the gay side.) Kinda has escaped containment since it originated as a bit of an anti-furry thing making (fair) mockery of cringy RP conventions, so might just be general too-online reference.
gattsuru
3d ago
The alleged shooter has been caught, and this time they seem confident enough about it to give a press conference.
We've gotten more details about the etched messages on shell casings, and they seem a mix of general antifa and memelord. The supposedly trans-related one looks to have actually been the furry-originated 'owo notices your bulge' joke, and that's usually more cis gay (or even, rarely, cis M/F) roleplay before it turned into a general cringey joke, but along with the rest of the details, it's looking pretty explicitly like radicalized iso-standard lefty.
I can't link to it without self-doxxing, but a teacher in a nearby school, one who I worked with for STEM outreach post-COVID, is now in state-level news for the same stuff as the Home Depot lady from months ago. I'm pointedly getting out of any chat or social media around that entire conversation and its downstream effects, and it's too early to drink, and I'm going to be working with students from that school later today and I'm not going to mention it and I used to respect him and I'm done.
gattsuru
3d ago
The 'she wasn't a virgin' defense to rape allegations didn't get accepted by juries very often in the modern era, but it was still pretty costly for genuine victims even where they were successful in getting their attackers brought down. What extent people don't bring charges in marginal cases where those costs are high is an unknowable number, but it's probably not zero.
gattsuru
3d ago
I'd hope he's learned a lesson or at least fear, and you're probably better at reading body language than I am, but Hasan specifically also has a pretty long history of pretty explicit calls to violence (cw: BakedAlaska link, also BA-grade legal analysis), and his career depends pretty heavily on not having a legal hammer or Senate nudge go after him. I have no idea what Twitch executive he's got compromising photos of, but given that the website is pretty notorious for banning game streamers who get too rough, there's gonna be some fallout on that sphere.
gattsuru
3d ago
What do you want to say at work that you think you're being prevented from saying because of potential employer liability under "hostile work environment" standards?
It's a matter of standing law that the Civil Rights Act controls what public radio stations that employees may turn on. Google defended -- and the NLRB accepted -- that anti-discrimination law actively required that the company police the speech of its employees. Other cases have held that employers are responsible for even off-premises and after-hours speech by their employees, or where the speech was not even directed from one employee to another.
What makes you think than your employer would have no problem with you saying that even if the potential liability didn't exist?
In some cases, this is plausible as a defense. Several early hostile work environment cases revolved around 'employees' who were already fired by their employer, with the lawsuit between plaintiff and employer revolving around whether the employer should have acted sooner.
In other cases, it's hard to even separate matters; there's now a strong convention against nudie mags in even the bluest-collar of blue collar jobs, and of course no employer wants their workers to be staring at breasts while on the job today. Would that have been considered as unacceptable without thirty years of HR hammering into every employer and employee?
But in most, it's not especially defensible. We just had a big court case about an employer making fun of an employee for being gay (and fat); the only reason the employer won (after a long and uncertain court case) was because everyone agreed this job was ministerial, not Because Free Speech Uber Allies. And the employer very clearly did not want to apply the anti-'hostile work environment' policy, given that they probably spent tens or thousands of dollars defending their not complying with it. There are hundreds of cases like this, almost all of them get no legal defense, and that's before getting to the wide variety that no one defies even when they want to because they know they're fucked.
And then you think for ten seconds, and you remember that people put a ton of political capital into not only maintaining but expanding (Bostock! Kinda a big deal!) these policies, and it becomes kinda obvious.
gattsuru
3d ago
This is a fascinating normative statement, and one I'd love to support.
As soon as we turn from 'should' to 'does', though, the answer changes radically. Mike Adams was forced into early retirement (and driven to suicide) over his personal writings in 2020. Damore doesn't have his old job at Google back, and the punchline to his whole NLRB thing was Google arguing (and the board accepting) that the law required them to fire employees for speech. People were fired for anonymous donations to Kyle Rittenhouse's defense fund. Nor does it stop at firing: Kyle Kashuv and Harvard, LexManos and Forge, Vaxry and Hypr, Mercedes Lackey and the convention circuit, yada yada.
There was a big important court case about whether the federal government can pressure private companies to ban and censor specific users, and SCOTUS said fine by us. [context]
Never again would be a wonderful philosophy. It also demands that it stop happening the first time. I would love to see that change. But I notice that it is only when progressives are getting fired that any progressive cares about freeze peach, even the ones that proclaim they were 'always' the principled ones.
I would love to have arguments against this strategy; I don't.
gattsuru
3d ago
Punchline to the Pause Letter story: data was 'lost'. Indeed, FOIA-able records for the relevant periods in question here were 'inadvertently lost' years ago, and we have only found out this month. Even after the FOIA was submitted, the SEC did not initially search these records, even after claiming both orally and in court filings to have completed and re-completed a search of all records, and unsurprisingly no disclosures of possible record destruction were ever delivered despite explicit regulatory requirements -- even long after the internal report about the scope of the 'inadvertent' data loss was complete.
Most critically, we did not get this by the grace of the courts.
gattsuru
3d ago
The issues show up without diving into algorithmic media.
gattsuru
4d ago
Probably a reference to this conversation and its predecessors.
... the problem is that there's two models, here.
One is that the Gay Rights Movement won by a campaign of sympathetic figure you knew in your community, and sometimes even were in your family, showing that People Could Be People. I'd like to believe this is true, and contemporaneously it's the argument I pushed for (admittedly, to a level of slower progress that would frustrate me today).
The other is that it won by absolutely crushing any disagreement. Brendan Eich did, in fact, lose his job, and people did, in fact, beat him in public and years later were quite proud of it. Code Pink would publicly embarrass you, Google would (accept third parties gaming their tech to) redirect searches with your last name to a definition involving scatological jokes, people would shitpost at sizable length about hurting every single person who didn't agree. More critically, entire infrastructure were designed and implemented to make this not just common, or standard, but unchallengable: even before Bostock and Obergfell a wide number of states and regulators held that saying mean things -- defined so broadly as to include religious or philosophical discussion -- were workplace discrimination, even if uttered off-premises and after-hours. Organizations built to foster political debate on the wrong side of the aisle were skinsuitted, and that skinsuiting became something they were required to aid and abet. For the majority of its advocates, and a supermajority of its more palatable advocates, you could not argue the soccon position.
I would like to believe that the former mattered more than the latter. I don't have a lot of arguments that the latter hurt.
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