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Brave Little Hitachi Wand

@ yakko @feddit.uk

Posts
6
Comments
959
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • What's the coolest performance you've ever seen?

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  • The stage production of Spirited Away was magical and captivating enough to hold the attention of my seven year old. For three hours. With subtitles. From the cheap seats. It is really really good.

    Penn and Teller's stage magic show was really something. Some of what I saw has stuck with me for years.

    Itchy-O, the marching band from hell, does a show that will leave a permanent mark on you. We were fortunate enough to see them on Halloween, and everyone was in costumes. Hard to beat that.

    Afrique en Cirque was incredible, we saw that and 360 All Stars at the Edinburgh fringe one year. That same week, we saw The Shadow Kingdom which was transformative. It's like a whole animated film that they just create right in front of you with nothing but puppets, a light, a boombox, and two people. It's truly unique, and I don't know why more people don't do a show like this.

  • AOC's answer on running for president leaves political world speechless

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  • It's a difficult thing to articulate, so I've put off responding. Sorry. I think there's a lot of daylight between how we view the US electorate for one thing - but perhaps not as much as I first thought. You're right that the distinctive difference between left and right-leaning voters is that only one side is highly critical of their candidates and easily falls out of love with them, while the other is a lot more willing to be led and uncritical. That's all pretty much what you'd expect from the research by Dr. Altemeyer on authoritarian personalities.

    I do not mean to propose that we should be uncritical of self-styled leftist candidates, only that we should be more willing to forgive. I think of people like Al Franken and (across the pond) Jeremy Corbyn who were doing good things and were successfully ousted based on smears and vibes. I do not mean they are perfect or that we should vote 'blue no matter who', but that we should give grace to people who get smeared because we live in an adverse media environment where billionaire-owned news and social media clearly give preferential treatment to the right, and often silences or viciously smears anyone who might be a problem. And we let them rob us of the voices we need in politics. That's all.

    A lot of my thoughts revolve around the game-theoretic implications of elections under FPTP. I feel that the dominant strategy in that 'game' is a bipolar oligarchy of mutually complicit actors who, in lay terms, run a good-cop/bad-cop con on the voter. You see it in the US very clearly, and to a lesser extent in the UK (because it's a different game, and the bipolar tendency is not as strong I think - though the chatter after the recent elections does seem to be reframing things in terms of Green v. Reform as a major upset, so it might just end up being a continuation of the same dynamic under different circumstances).

    So in that situation of good cop/bad cop that I see happening, yes different things motivate different voters but - crucially - these two parties are operating on two sides of the same basic con (and I don't think it's a con that necessarily involves deliberate awareness of the con, I just see it as an emergent aspect of this game).

    Basically I just hate the game, it needs to change. I don't know how cogent you'll find this, sorry I don't have a lot of time to edit down. Until someone's doing that, I'm going to advocate for being more forgiving. Still critical, but knowing that every time we cut someone loose we're weaker, and they're always stacking the deck against us.

    There you go. Bad, weird opinions. You asked!

  • Plex’s price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

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  • Cake in the ground capitalism-babble

  • Plex’s price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

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  • It is though. Property doesn't know who it belongs to like crap you steal in a video game, all flagged red when you try to sell it at a potion shop. Owning the information on your computer is as natural as owning the bugs that are eating your mouldy mint plant.

  • Trump says he will send ‘Election Integrity Army’ into every state for midterms

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  • Disobedience is the key, it would have worked back in Germany and it would work today. Teach your children political disobedience, because not enough adults know how anymore.

  • Removed

    Michigan residents voted down a $16 billion Stargate AI data center, then construction began anyway

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  • Join the crews working on it. Mark out and soften up a secret access point for a plucky freedom fighter.

  • MAGAs Are Fuming After Email Confirms They Will Never Get Their $500 Trump Phones or Deposits Back

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  • I only feel sorry about the money that is now gathered up into the hands of an empowered monster instead of safely dispersed amongst brainless lickspittles.

  • AOC's answer on running for president leaves political world speechless

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  • Fair enough points, I can take them at face value. I just grew up very disillusioned with leftist infighting generally, so I tend to see any leftward scrutiny with a jaundiced eye. In a first past the post system, the side that is least critical of their candidate is going to mainly win I feel, and though I know the value of being critical too well, living in this system makes me of two minds about it.

  • AOC's answer on running for president leaves political world speechless

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  • Your point is well taken. There is the small matter of my having moved abroad... Sorry for that.

    Like drinking or eating meat, I still follow American politics against my better judgment, and occasionally I opine.

  • AOC's answer on running for president leaves political world speechless

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  • So you want someone stupider, or at least better at seeming like they don't think? I don't think I take your meaning. Politicians are meant to be 'calculating', it's a famously viperous workplace. I prefer one that thinks, and I don't mind if you can tell when they're doing it.

    People should be less obsessed with optics, and more oriented towards what politicians do.

  • AOC's answer on running for president leaves political world speechless

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  • I'm not telling her what to do, she's clearly better at this stuff than I'll ever be

  • Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

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  • Wet ass piefed?

  • Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

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  • I'm so hyped for fedipalooza

  • Claude Code's creator is sick of the phrase 'vibe coding.' Suggest your alternative here.

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  • Fuckin' thing SUCKS

  • teriyaki rice and chicken.

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  • It's a bit of a crutch for using far less sugar, but maybe you're right.

  • What do most normal people do on their phones to pass the time?

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  • (Sam Elliott voice) He too is god's handiwork.

  • teriyaki rice and chicken.

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  • Yeah but I'm from Seattle, we have our own spin on things. And I just really like ginger and garlic

  • Unappreciated in my own lifetime

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  • Well sure, but the context for my comment was the unnatural-ness of a structured job interview. If you're not just pantsing it, such interviews follow a script, and that's not how we normally talk to each other.

  • Unappreciated in my own lifetime

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  • Interviewing is (ideally) quite a structured type of conversation, when is a job interview. A lot of people have to lock in pretty hard to deal with how unnatural it is, and they might not have the spare bandwidth to catch a joke.

    Especially not someone from HR, they're fucking troglodytes.