I can't verify this will solve your problems but I use a firefox extension called imagemax url that i guess was intended to find the largest image size but it actually goes through these things that obfuscate the image link so you can just right click and download the image once you click on the extension (it's just a selection in the right click context menu). It's definitely handy for the new annoying trend of making things undownloadable.
firefox extension link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-max-url/?src=external-rfaq
script link: https://openuserjs.org/scripts/qsniyg/Image_Max_URL
EDIT: Also, some images that have been fucked for me with bad headers or whatever, where they won't open in my image viewer or Photoshop, I can open them in paint and just save them again and it has made them usable for me after doing so.
plural
3mo ago
Thank you. I wonder if not having a direct competitor at this point is having an effect in any way. Much the same as "generic democrat" or "generic republican" can probably beat any specific democrat or republican. I think until he gets into a debate or does like a 60 minutes interview most of this is prognosticating without enough information. Palin not being able to name books or supreme court decisions is a kind of gaff/failure that moves the needle in my mind and as long as Vance can come across as even slightly intelligent he won't be impactful to the election. The fact that they're going so hard and so constantly against him with so little means, in my mind, they don't have much to tar him with. I am surprised they seem to have him out there appealing to the base though, maybe they needed to appeal to republicans more than independents.
Maybe his freshness or even appeal to republicans is a reason to pick him, but maybe it's just that Trump can stand him and considering the volatility of trying to get a VP that might publicly disagree with Trump and get Trump to start huffing and puffing at his own party it might be better to pick an "unlikable toady" than someone who might cause Trump to gaffe himself out of the election. It heads off Trump tripping over himself down the line. Who knows what strategy was put into the choice or if there wasn't any at all, really. Trump feels like a black box that you can't mess with if you want it to perform, if he decides it's JD Vance, then just let it be and try to make best of what you have.
plural
3mo ago
The ad actually strikes me as too jokey to be effective. But maybe it doesn't hit close enough to home for me to understand why it would be effective or offensive in either direction. It just seems like a standard current year SNL skit in that it's not really funny but you can tell it's trying to be and mostly aiming for some agreement claps.
plural
3mo ago
Could you link to those polls? How much of that factual point is democrats responding to the polls? It would not surprise me at all if the polling was far more partisan than when Palin ran and democrats answering presidential polls are probably skewed far more negative nowadays toward republican candidates regardless of who that candidate actually is. I don't think people during the McCain campaign era would be grousing that an assassination attempt against him failed. I think even discounting McCain being an outlier where democrats could like him that kind of opposition party respect just does not exist anymore. Trump is literally Hitler. Vance what's-his-name is VP, well then he's Hitler, too. Not even saying it doesn't work both ways but I'd bet that favorability does not matter unless someone is undecided anymore because anyone who's of the opposite party is going to be as negative as it can get.
I genuinely think it would make little difference who Trump picked. There would be wild and constant hysterics about anyone. Some of it would be mitigated if the person had more experience or was a more palatable gender or race but they'd still be ground into dust by the media machine just like Palin was and Vance is getting done. If Vance's childless cat-lady quote can be so easily taken out of context and create an entire personality for people to hate then anyone who has any public statements in the past is going to get the same treatment.
plural
3mo ago
In a similar vein, Carmen Mola didn't exist and was the pen name for three men and it was only revealed when they won a prize and went to claim it.
plural
3mo ago
I was skeptical but here's what happened when I tried it in a private tab:
https://i.imgur.com/A6o3XVZ.png
https://i.imgur.com/l6wS075.png
https://i.imgur.com/OSixrIk.png
Autocomplete for anything after Donald didn't show up at all, "tru" let alone "trump."
plural
4mo ago
I'm guessing a lot of people are getting words audibly and then repeating them in print phonetically. It's common enough to become a thing. I'm guessing people just read a lot less books/newspapers/magazines where they'd have learned the correct phrasing of things. I remember having the opposite problem where I'd read a lot as a kid and knew words and phrases but not how they actually sounded out loud so when I'd try to say it I sounded dumb but people who learned it from hearing it would know how to say it right but maybe not how to write it.
At least they're probably using the word to mean what it actually means and they just don't know how to spell it. It doesn't bother me but I see so many people use the word nonplussed to mean not impressed (which arguably makes sense) even though it means confused. One thing I see a lot of even really smart people do is say "with regards to" instead of "with regard to" and I have to stop myself from commenting about it at this point.
I think using the wrong words or phrases or spelling them incorrectly isn't that bad of a thing but I hate the new trend of everyone just deciding that being grammatically incorrect is correct if enough people are wrong and doing it enough. Mostly because it feels like people trying to write history rather than letting it happen.
plural
5mo ago
Netflix picked it up for a second season before the first one dropped. So, they're more invested than they usually are about it being successful.
Interestingly, or perhaps not if you know Shane Gillis, it's also one of those rare pieces of media that has critics and users split with critics giving it bad reviews and users giving it good. Almost every professional review seems to talk about how it's anti-woke and lists off instances of how its offensive within the review. I feel like it's being unfairly reviewed in several instances and it really does make me want to root for it, too. One of the reviews that basically just listed a bunch of trigger warnings for sexist/racist remarks or behavior said they didn't laugh once while watching it (interestingly this is not the worst critical review of it).
I watched a couple episodes after seeing the post here and kinda liked it but I usually don't enjoy the awkward/uncomfortable portions of things like this but I couldn't deny it made me laugh. It reminds of FX's first grungy list of original shows. And while reading the reviews and many comparing it to It's Always Sunny made me think of people recently I heard talking about the first season of It's Always Sunny and they said it was "rough"/"hard-to-watch" and I assumed they were talking about that it wasn't as good, but apparently it was too offensive. I haven't watched the show in years because it started to feel like new Simpsons level of paling-in-comparison but it makes me wonder how inoffensive it's become.
plural
6mo ago
- It's faster, maybe? Though it's not really that strange for someone to have something like steak and potatoes and eat the steak and then the potatoes or vice versa. Or maybe it's just preferring more flavoring to less. I don't know how you'd measure that though. Is grilled chicken in a tortilla more or less flavorful than fried chicken?
plural
6mo ago
I remember a twitch streamer I watch who's admittedly very left-wing but also genuinely doesn't act or seem mean at all otherwise, but when Barbara Bush died they did a celebratory stream in response. I really don't know how common it was to dance on graves in public discourse in the past but it really bothers me that the people that do it will claim that other behavior or statements they disagree with is "gross."
Specifically about Queen Elizabeth I was in a discord server about a video game where when it happened someone immediately responded with "good, she was a racist." Though, in real life nobody does that they just never mention it at all or say something equivalent to "oh, that happened." In my real life I see this in reverse for right-leaning political people, they're more likely to be political in real life than they are online. Admittedly I have a smaller pool of right-leaning people to pull from so I can't really tell if they're more civil.
It still bugs the shit out of me that people are so absolutely uncivil and rude in public forums online and rarely does anyone do anything. But I've gotten into arguments with them before and the response was pure defense, there's nothing to be ashamed at all about for being uncivil, mean or rude to people they consider uncivil, mean or rude. Even if I agreed, I don't know how they can sustain it without a bottomless well of anger.
plural
6mo ago
Yeah, and it shouldn't matter either way. If you think it's important to tease apart the minutiae of this example in defense of something that is clearly not pornography then I'll take this conversational detour as an agreement that people deciding that things need to be censored or banned based on a passing familiarity with the content should be ignored.
plural
6mo ago
My experience with this, mainly, are games that are refused from steam without explanation. This happens every few months and sometimes the people in them are children in a towel or underwear but sometimes there's absolutely no one underage in them at all. The tinfoil theory is there's someone that approves games on steam that thinks all anime games are pedophilic in nature. Maybe that's true or not there are quite a few people that are always commenting about how happy they are that steam is trying to put a stop to this stuff and they're always "SJW" when I look at their profiles. They do seem to think that even when the age is changed that it is simply a fig leaf like the little girl who is a 500 year old dragon. Which, to me, suggests that it doesn't matter what their age actually is because they think something drawn underage is underage. Though how they can tell the difference between a 17 and 18 year old anime girl is unknown to me.
To be clear, I wasn't passing on "vibes" that was your word I repeated and should have put quotes around. I was telling you that people interested in this moral crusade are left leaning based on my experience. Though, now, I entirely understand why that other person blocked you because you argue in bad faith by continually misrepresenting others' words to "win" an argument. No, the legislation that deals with child pornography has absolutely nothing to do with videogames that may or may not portray a child or child-looking adults as having anything sexually related at all as being the equivalent of pornography. Nobody is actually talking about pornography but you because you don't understand what we're talking about or are actually trying to misrepresent what we're talking about. The entire crux here is shit like "that anime girl's 17 and wearing thigh high boots, this is clearly sexualizing minors" even people that want to stamp this stuff out don't actually refer to it as pornography.
plural
6mo ago
You're arguing about something that nobody was even asking about. The people that care about "underage" character in videogames have nothing to do with court cases. I honestly don't even understand how you even make that connection with what I said and someone talking about Australian games that are classified "poorly" or refused classification and court cases/laws from the United States. I'll trust my vibes over your info that is not about anything either I or the above comment were talking about.
plural
6mo ago
It absolutely is a leftist demand, but it only applies to things that aren't western. Anime style can only be attractive to people who are pedophiles. Therefore anyone attempting to be attractive in anime style is appealing to pedophiles. When I think back 10-20-30 years nobody would give a shit about this at all. Sailor Moon would be re-edited for American audiences now with more modest clothing and all sexual innuendo changed to say "pickles... .. ... farthead" or whatever they change many modern japanese translations to say.
Because it doesn't matter it's just a videogame or an anime and only children watch those and if you watch or play them you're a child and probably a pedophile if you enjoy anything not western.
This is a huge vibe I get from literally anyone trying to crusade against "underaged girls" being exploited in the videogames. Of course they'd never say that but every other aspect of their political and cultural bent is left, they just happen to also think that underage anime girls presents some kind of major moral issue because they're fighting pedophiles.
Not many people gave a shit about trying to censor American Beauty and those that did certainly aren't the same people that give a shit about a 100% more tame anime visual novel coming out now that will get rejected from steam while "Hitler rapes all the milfs" will be sold without problem. A japanese visual novel will get rejected from steam for an underage girl wearing a towel for a scene but a western visual novel about underage siblings engaging in incest and cannibalism, that's fine, the art style isn't even anime. Or even outside of mainly sexual content something like the Witcher or Cyberpunk is fine for twitch but I can guarantee if the characters were anime-looking it would be banned, or maybe if they were simply produced outside of the western-okay-to-be-sexual sphere and anime-looking is just a happenstance.
Sure there are some hardliners that don't want any sexuality in anything and will side with the crusaders but the crusaders are faux fighting pedophilia and they're almost entirely left wing. Why? I don't know in either case but the only people that I've encountered that care and are happy when steam bans a visual novel that has like a two second scene of an "underage" girl in her underwear are all left wing, to the point that it's most of their commentary on reddit dedicated to it.
plural
6mo ago
It would be interesting to see how people would respond if you asked them would you rather be stuck in a forest with a bear or a black man. Would the fear of being thought of as a racist overcome the fear of men?
It's funny that you mention that because my first thought when I saw this question was "what kind of bear?"
I think it's interesting because if I think of the question being "would you rather be stuck on a desert island with a man or a tiger?" (or even something less likely prey on you like a chimpanzee) I bet the answers come out way different. It's like a kind of scissor-statement someone constructed in a lab. Something about choosing the woods changes things dramatically in my mind for some reason and I bet a lot of it is media related. Being stuck in the woods implies something a lot more menacing from a human perspective than being stuck elsewhere. But it could also just be because "stuck in the woods" doesn't really make sense and implies something else happening because can't you just leave the woods? It's not like a desert island or a locked room, what does stuck mean here? Anyway, I think it's all just Tik-Tok brainrot and pure signaling. Also, I think there's something to be said about how a lot of younger people seem to interact with things with absolute insincerity as a default probably because they're afraid if their real opinion will be culturally wrong.
This whole thing reminds me of the that red pill/blue pill question/poll that was apparently 8 months ago where, to me, it seemed most people probably chose blue pill because it said "save" and also it used the framing of red pill vs blue pill and people just chose blue reflexively.
plural
6mo ago
I mean, I don't agree with the conclusions here but his fame outside of football is absolutely manufactured. Though, that doesn't mean it wasn't built on something that exists.
But I didn't know he existed until last summer when suddenly he had a documentary, started dating Taylor Swift, hosted Saturday Night Live within like six months. Not to say that most people that are famous aren't manufactured in some way as well, that's the game. It's just personal PR but it's certainly not coming organically. I had no idea who the last like (insert number) of whatever boyfriend's Taylor Swift had before this so it can't just be that. Nor were there personal stories inserted into non-gossip publications dedicated to them simply being Taylor Swift's boyfriend. Maybe it's a convergence of things and simply luck, that they decided to run more stories about this relationship than the previous ones, but it's still manufacturing fame.
plural
7mo ago
You're assuming I'm right wing because I have that opinion. Call me self-deluded if you want but most of my opinions are far left of anyone here. Though I read your union and abortion til birth opinions sound pretty normal left wing to me but I admit I live in a bubble. Most people I know are all or nothing and don't really care about nuance about things, if they believe in unions they believe in every aspect of unions if they think abortion should be legal they make no distinctions on it about how it should be practiced at all. I know it's because they mostly don't care about meting or puzzling out complexity but I also think even if you sat them down and made them think about it there's only a small proportion of people who would be moved to make specific lines about how much of their belief should be used in government mandates/laws. But I live in southern California, maybe that paints my life different.
But I didn't mean to suggest that right wing people are the only ones that will talk, I mean to suggest that it's right coded right now, because they're not in power, because they're the minority, because they will let the discussion touch ends they don't like or want possibly or probably because of those reasons.
Left wing people, in my experience, limited as it may be, will shut down conversations with insults or insults by proxy the moment it becomes even close to being about something they don't like. I've had right wing people talk to me about deep state stuff and it starts off with "I know you think I'm crazy but this is what I believe..." and when I question it they get excited that I'm interested and tell me more like the more they say the more I'll believe. And when I questioned the Steele Dossier's accuracy I had someone switch their tone of voice to the way you talk to a very small child and question my mental fitness and this was just a mild like "I don't know it seems kinda far-fetched..." And that's from people I know, people I don't will just respond with things like "oh so you're a shitty person" or more likely use the originator of a claim or opinion or the biggest name espousing it and then call them a piece of shit so they don't have to call you one. I'm sure they'd be perfectly happy and cordial to talk about a discussion where I was in full agreement with them, but I don't know that I'd consider that a discussion.
plural
7mo ago
While you may be right, I'd quibble with considerably. Moving from Reddit is going to do that regardless because Reddit's rules make a place more left wing because they restrict what you can talk about to begin with. And you lose people that would prefer Reddit over other places and they'd probably be more left wing just going by the idea that: 1) someone using reddit at all is more likely to be left wing. 2) people leaving reddit for another site are more likely to be right wing. The entire idea that the motte leave reddit at all is explicitly right wing coded. Discussing HBD is right wing coded. Discussing trans issues is right wing coded (I say that because discussing means there's more than one view represented). In my experience discussing issues at all is right wing coded. Most of the people I know and most of the people I encounter are left wing and have no interest at all in talking about anything to do with actual issues, they have their stance they've taken and if you talk about it deeper you're a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, shitty person. Unless you're dedicated to proving right wing people wrong in every situation you're simply a bad person. I've heard this many times. And I suppose it's mostly a confluence of most people being left wing and most people really being unable to tolerate content they disagree with and being almost wholly uncurious. But all that being said, it's like IG-111, we're here because we're witches and they allow witches here. The 1000 witches problem is never really going to go away.
I do think that you're posting this in bad faith, however. Considering your examples of most upvoted comments are sitting at 7, 10, and 18 votes and your summary of each being both inaccurate and uncharitable. Why did no one respond to your HBD post about white suffering, because almost no one cares about HBD anymore. The idea that HBD has been talked about to death has been talked about to death, here. But you made it very clear in your post that you didn't believe what you wrote, it wasn't a trick like that post about one movie destroying a child's brain. Do you believe that no one read your disclaimer or that no one here respects steelmanning an argument they don't believe? Is that why you didn't bother to link to it? You brought up none of those rebuttals yourself but instead make a top level post calling people out who actually had the courage to make a post about something they believe and you're mad because they got a marginal amount of internet points and that nobody brought up your own points. It's hard enough to have the energy to argue your own thoughts, now you want us to argue yours as well.
plural
7mo ago
Allen's accusers are celebrities themselves, I think it makes a massive difference given that the investigators dismissed them at the time. If Mia Farrow was nobody and her kids were nobodies too this would be a weird fact that nobody knows about Woody Allen. Though, I think his marriage makes it not just easy to believe it about him it's weird enough that he basically has to prove a negative to make himself look right. I mean, he was investigated twice for months at a time and both investigations concluded that abuse did not take place. Maybe he's good at hiding it but it's always seemed to me to be that Mia found out Woody was sleeping with Soon-Yi and either invented the abuse in her head or just lied about it for revenge. But I don't really know, that's just the reading I get from the wikipedia article about it.
Either way, Woody's a joke because he married his daughter. That's the biggest reason he's a soft target, and the reason, even if he didn't do what he's accused of, most people will believe it regardless of if there's even evidence presented.
plural
7mo ago
I don't find that report very convincing at all. They don't even know the mechanism of what's happening. They just present a bunch of Russians that exist around these events and then say there's classified intel they have that makes it clear that it's Russians but they can't reveal what that is. It's possible sure, but this report basically has people saying they have had Havana Syndrome, there were Russians around when they got it, and there's classified intel that makes them sure it's Russians. It all seems like highly motivated reasoning.
Tonight, we're reporting for the first time, an incident at last year's NATO summit in Lithuania—a meeting that focused largely on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and was attended by President Biden. Multiple sources tell us that a senior official of the Department of Defense was struck by the symptoms and sought medical treatment. We told Greg Edgreen what we'd learned.
Greg Edgreen: It tells me that there are no barriers on what Moscow will do, on who they will attack, and that if we don't face this head on, the problem is going to get worse.
I mean this was included, as near as I can tell it's nothing. It doesn't even say that they think it was actually Havana Syndrome it just says he had symptoms, then they turn to the talking head to confirm that Russia definitely did that. Why not target Ukrainians? I tried to ctrl-f looking Ukraine in the fairly long wikipedia article on it and got no results. What makes Americans and Canadians so special? I also don't know why the Office of National Intelligence would release a response saying that it's unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible after this report because, at least in my mind, it's favorable for the US to pretend its true even if it's not because bolstering Russia as a boogeyman is a valuable distraction against anything happening domestically. Especially when the FBI and the White House released statements that basically said nothing at all except acknowledging that Havana Syndrome exists. All that being said, I don't think it's super unlikely just that this isn't convincing.
She asked us to withhold her name for her safety. She's the wife of a Justice Department official who was with the embassy in Tbilisi. She's a nurse with a Ph.D. in anesthesiology. On Oct. 7, 2021, she says that she was in her laundry room when she was blindsided by a sound.
Anyway, this is actually what I wanted to post about about anyway. What, they couldn't list her height and weight and DOB?
plural
8mo ago
In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.
I didn't know Sweet Baby Inc existed before a post about the new Suicide Squad game was on the front page of /r/all on reddit which was a dossier in the game written by Lex Luther praising the Amazonian culture of Wonder Woman for not having "toxic masculinity" and the comments were talking about Sweet Baby Inc as the reason this kind of writing exists.
That aside people complain about "woke" writing in videogames all the time. It's just that the people that do it usually either do it very badly or the ones that do it badly are very heavily exposed and then completely dismissed. The Last of Us Part 2 was heavily criticized for bad writing and injecting woke themes to the detriment of its plot aside from people not liking the plot itself or the way it was told. That was huge in the gaming sphere and was a much bigger bone of contention than Sweet Baby Inc is now, mostly because the culture war was used as a cudgel to deny any merit to criticism of the game.
From what I've seen, on reddit at least, there's nothing like a culture war touchstone like gamergate, everyone just shits on the writing of Sweet Baby Inc and there's not even any pushback at all which is really rare. Probably because it's like that diversity tool that blizzard made, people who don't care or like woke content will defend it at all costs if they think it's real artistic intent but the fact that it's counterfeit corporate checkboxing to make sure the game is woke probably pushes any defense the people who would defend the games woke content would have away. Naked corporate manipulation for profit (though, I can't imagine how this is profitable, but I also can't imagine how to spin these things any other way that's not them nakedly saying they're paying people to create propaganda tools/writing) is on the same level as being generally right wing. Which is a long way of saying I don't think people are heavily invested in this because most people are at the very least vaguely aware this was happening already, they just maybe thought it was from agenda pushers involved in the game dev process, the reveal that it's ingrained at a corporate level doesn't change much for people who didn't like the fact that it was there and definitely isn't a damsel that people need to rescue like Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkesian.
I was just perusing /r/kotakuinaction to look at what they were saying about it and one of the comments was "might as well call it Jan 6 "Insurrection" part 2 since they have as much in common."
It feels like outlets that got a lot of traffic from gamergate are trying to push the name again to generate more ruckus for clicks or attention on both sides.
plural
8mo ago
I think you're right but it's not just a torch being passed on. Writing in general became about representation both from the author and in the writing. Look at the many amazing reviews of the writing for the new True Detective series because it was run by a woman and was about women. Or basically any of the many threads we've had about book awards even among those that people acquiesce is well written it also almost always is about something that has an ideological purpose/bent to it.
It's probably harder to identify the good when you have to include a bunch of other conditions on the writing for it to be considered worthy of praise/awards these days. I'm not saying it doesn't exist but even before this became a big part of identifying what is "good art" these days there was a glut of basically everything that no one has time or really care to dig through.
I wonder what happened to ghost writers for movies though. Used to be you'd get people like Tom Stoppard rewriting almost all of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Quentin Tarantino punching up Crimson Tide, Aaron Sorkin rewriting the Rock or even Tony Gilroy and Aaron Sorkin improving Enemy of the State, so even in these popcorn action movies we'd get some quality dialogue. Now, I guess they figured out that it didn't matter or don't care or the writer's that would be ghostwriting are just making indies? It's a mystery but I think it's why modern action movies often feel soulless compared to older ones because they don't ever bother to try to improve them. Or more likely people don't care about the difference, say what you want about Joss Whedon but there is a stark difference between his writing and someone aping his writing but I'm sure most people don't care to notice the difference. A large portion of people like Fallout 3 better than New Vegas and can't even understand how the writing is any different. And most people who are into "good" writing don't care about making things that are pulpy better they want Disco Elysium they don't want the next God of War to be written like that or even care if it's rewritten by a better writer just to make the dialogue better. I wonder if anyone who likes an action movie that was rewritten several times to get the script in a better state could ever identify that they liked that movie because of the writing, anyway?
This is just pointless. Why is someone getting banned for doing the exact same thing that a poster did above them but the above poster doesn't even get a warning?
The mod queue being how we decide if someone gets banned is just dumb. I check the user/janitor thing every time I'm here and it's like half of the reported comments (which I assume is how they get there) is because someone disagreed with them and they're using the report as an extra downvote. And it's obvious that is skews in one political direction as well, maybe because they're a smaller portion of the people here or maybe it's just their way because it certainly is on places like reddit. But using that as an excuse is surely just going to end up with people deciding the only way to decide what is acceptable on the site is just mass reporting everything they disagree with.
I still don't understand why the mods here can't ever ban people for the things they do that are bad but instead keep a secret tally of bad things that they don't disclose and then ban them for all those things when they do something less egregious. And almost always in a baited argument where the person doing the baiting does not even get a warning.
More options
Context Copy link