uriel238
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far away... 1 week ago:
It was the petit bourgeoisie that started the French Revolution after the Estates General of 1789 and the commoners followed them. I was basing the Rebel Alliance after them, hinted at since among the promoted soldiers in Rebel Alliance command were not-just-a-few nobles.
- Comment on Not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far away... 1 week ago:
A couple of points:
1) The Alliance formed after a good chunk of the Galactic Empire was feeling the pressure of being imperial rather than republic. Granted, the republic was corrupt like Chicago during Prohibition, but while it existed many of the public departments were still actively serving their role (more or less).
2) The Alliance was not formed from the proletariat, but the noble houses and companies pushed out (who fell out of favor) when the empire rose. Their plan was to restore the republic system that recognized their wealth and political power. And there might have been a period like this comic when Imperial interests were willfully lying to opposition parties and interests to prolong the time before they got serious and formed a military.
3) It was atrocities like Alderaan that really fueled recruitment into the Alliance. Every young person who had family lost in the Alderaan event at least considered joining up, and if they were sympathetic to the Alliance (or had no loyalty to the Empire) were inclined to do so even if their prior ambitions were apolitical, e.g. art or medicine or civil engineering or whatever. ALSO Alderaan was only the most recent atrocity committed by the Empire in the name of enforcing its political power. And (as per long-studied Counter Insurgency) every act of brutality by tyranny draws more of the population into the resistance. The Alliance was just the most popular and best supported movement.
4) NOTE: This is speculation based on circumstances, much like the Endor Holocaust (The EH is implied by the ROTJ events but was later rectconned out via additional canon): The final point of the Death Star is not merely to be a planet-destroying superweapon but a mining tool to crack open (lifeless or evacuated) planets to get to interior precious minerals. While its success as such a tool might be uncertain, had it not been destroyed, the hope by its crew, engineers and support staff was that the superlaser would not often be used as a military device (optimally never again!) but could still be used in the process of gathering necessary resources.
- Comment on No means no 1 week ago:
Recently Google decided to enforce its storage limits, which is how I discovered most of my Google cloud storage was backed up photos I never once asked Google to back up. It was… tedious getting them deleted, and I had to desync my phone lest it also delete my device’s gallery as well.
It all seemed to be a ploy to force me to buy more cloud storage space. Thank you, no.
- Comment on Bernie Sanders talking to progressives about how the Democrats' messaging needs to change [Day 82] 1 week ago:
The Democratic Party needs to go hard into socialized services or just pack up. Right now it looks complicit in the GOP coup d’etat.
The same, incidentally is true for the Labor party in UK, and for the other neoliberal parties all throughout Europe. Serve the people for realsies this time, or pack up as the Neville Chamberlain party.
- Comment on Whatever it takes to get to solidarity amongst the working class. 1 week ago:
Our asses touched the same seat. We are brothers in revolution against the autocracy! ☭💣
Gave it a touch up.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Sadly, during DADT, the rate of discharges due to outing was at a higher rate than before DADT.
In the US military, DEI is not merely about readiness, but about recruitment and retention as well. Seriously, we counter-recruiters already have enough material to illustrate how joining up is a Really Bad Idea.™
- Comment on Washington DC to be renamed to St Donaldsburg 1 week ago:
For a while it was Leningrad.
- Comment on Washington DC to be renamed to St Donaldsburg 1 week ago:
Trumpgrad!
- Comment on Modding the Gulf of Mexico Back 2 weeks ago:
Um no.
A state can decide what it names itself or names a part of itself (e.g. Black Lives Matter Plaza). The story of Ukraine illustrates this.
But geographers and cartographers don’t decide what to name a place or get orders from states by fiat (unless the mapper is a state agent working for a department) They name things based on what they’re called.
The gulf is known to most of the world and the International Hydrographic Organization as Golfo de México or in English, Gulf of Mexico, and calling it the Gulf of America (say by Google Maps) is political allegiance signaling, that they are MAGA or MAGA collaborators.
If you want to be spicy you can call it Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl or the House of Chalchiuhtlicue based on the South American deity of the sea. It has a nice ominous Siege of R’lyeh feel that reflects the tempestuous weather of the ocean expanse.
- Comment on It's like throwing Fabergé Eggs at walls for amusement 2 weeks ago:
I TELL YOU WHEN I’VE HAD ENOUGH!
- Comment on In light of recent events, here's OpenStreetMap editors discussing naming of the Gulf of Mexico 3 weeks ago:
As I explained to Google (from Dan McClellan) _references do not assert from fiat what things are called. A dictionary definition is not an official definition but what a word means or what a thing is called at the moment.
Most of the world calls it the Golfo de México or in English speaking regions, the Gulf of Mexico. Changing all the maps of the world won’t change this.
Now granted, a state chooses what to call itself (such as the changing of The Ukraine to simply Ukraine but that is the incorporated entity that is the sovereign nation of Ukraine.
As the US does not have sovereign control of the Gulf of Mexico, it doesn’t get to declare the name of a region of international waters.
This whole thing just makes the GOP, MAGA, the Trump administration and by proxy the people of the United States xenophobic and barbaric as hell. It’s not a good look.
- Comment on US Government said try working, you can return to disability during trial period. Now they claim unable to go back during trial period because of obscure technical reason. 3 weeks ago:
John Oliver on LWT explained that the cap hasn’t been adjusted for inflation in decades, and should be around $10K now rather than $2K. It is not.
- Comment on "Poetic take" on the state of the US 3 weeks ago:
To the secular and the naturalist, this tells us it was a problem even then.
- Comment on Eat that ramen 4 weeks ago:
A climate crisis! Global famine coming soon!
It’ll be like the Mad Max series with fewer cars and more cannibalism. (You think I’m kidding?)
- Comment on Have you tried coping harder? 4 weeks ago:
Under the Stalinist soviet communism, which was dictatorship
How about under Zapatista communism (which is still going on)? Or Black Panther communism, at least until the FBI (under J. Edgar Hoover, so acting as the capitalist state’s secret police) massacred the BP administrative leaders?
Tell us more about the joys of capitalist healthcare. At least for the common American, we get bare minimum socialized healthcare, and even it is on the chopping block. The rest is an insurance company that willfully (and oddly, legally) dodges its only job, and a medical system so hyperinflated it puts people into lifelong debt.
So STFU with jingoistic platitudes and virtue-signaling to your fellow MAGAs, and put up a real argument.
Or not.
- Comment on You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism | Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them 4 weeks ago:
I have the social skills of a cholla cactus and so when someone says ѻɼﻭคกٱչﻉ ץѻપɼ กﻉٱﻭɦ๒ѻɼɦѻѻɗ กﻉՇฝѻɼᛕ I find it only confusing and unintelligible. I did consider making cookies for my neighbors with a notice saying _I don’t know how to ዐዪኗልክጎጊቿ ል ክቿጎኗዘጌዐዪዘዐዐዕ ክቿፕሠዐዪጕ but maybe someone else does…here’s some cookies? Mind you, my neighborhood is a tad lower class and has an air of desperation so they may not trust my cookies.
It’s a thought. My kitchen appliances are lent out right now, and I don’t actually know how to bake.
But I seem to understand enough leftist theory to bridge those who, like me, have been brainwashed to see communism and socialism as derisives and terms of contempt.
I’m also going through a psychotic break because a lot of stressors piled up at the same time seventy-seven million voters decided to give the Genie’s lamp to Jaffar.
- Comment on They're coming 4 weeks ago:
I downloaded Lemmy because social media fulfills some social needs, and it’s a nicer place than Reddit. And I avoid Twitter and Facebook like I do hipster singles bars.
- Comment on someone tell Luigi about this 4 weeks ago:
Actually, something that focused the report forward in a narrow wave would be super useful.
- Comment on Tfw you see two or more strongly monogomous, vegetarian African parrots in the genus Agapornis (family Psittaculidae) which are often kept as pets but they decide to fly away fr fr [Day 36] 1 month ago:
Keep food out for them (maybe with a selective feeder). They might come back.
- Comment on It would have been interesting 1 month ago:
Jesus with selfie stick and handsome white-guy filter.
- Comment on Do you want me to heat that up in the "Michael Wave"? 1 month ago:
As a veteran dumper of useful stuff in the street, this is missing a magical word:
WORKS!
This is especially important during the age of CRT monitors since mischief-makers are glad to assume otherwise and smash the tube.
This magic word makes stuff disappear twice as fast.
- Comment on Way to learn a language 1 month ago:
This is an old John Candy joke from Splash
- Comment on Caveman technology 1 month ago:
You’re quite welcome. I’m a whodunnit genre nerd so I love talking about it.
- Comment on Family chat be like 1 month ago:
Grandma gets it.
- Comment on Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior' 1 month ago:
On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette Packet – [Big Brother was] everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed – no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
– George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty-Four - Comment on Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior' 1 month ago:
Want in resin pin form.
- Comment on Caveman technology 1 month ago:
The closed circle of suspects is a mystery trope that has commonly carried onto the slasher / thriller genre even though it’s not necessary. The purpose isn’t necessarily to limit suspects, but also to keep the victims within the killing box (Fringe examples might be Phone Booth or Speed ).
In cozy mysteries, this was a narrative device not just to box in the culprit and the victims, but also to make it clear to the reader that this is your set of suspects. (Mysteries traditionally were puzzles that the reader was supposed to be able to follow along and solve with the clues found by the investigator… though the authors didn’t always play fair.) The classic example is the bridge between mystery-thrillers and slashers, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, in which the trek to the island and an imminent storm really secures the notion that no-one is getting in or out. (Plot point: – 🤓 – Vera Elizabeth Claythorne, a PE instructor is quite fit and a strong swimmer, and might have been able to swim to shore and either outrun or weather the storm. She chooses not to, though.)
This whole exercise was started by a supercut of movie instances in which phone service failed, a narrative device to lock in the participants (killers, investigators and victims alike) and lock out anyone else, and this was during that societal transition as people adjusted from often being separated, to always having a connection handy.
My point for the exercise was to note that instant communication may make a circle leaky, but it adds bunches of cool new tropes, and doesn’t require turning off the phones (or the prior murderer trick, cutting the house phone lines.)
I have a different rant about the police, who, in mysteries go from clever and central to the solution to totally useless without the investigator. But in the 21st century, they can also turn your mystery into a dystopian horror as they SWAT into your home, kill all the minorities (and the dogs) and arrest everyone else for the homicides they committed.
- Comment on Go into debt if you have to 1 month ago:
Ima just leave this here, Climate Town’s discussion of Natural Gas (or what we call Methane. Fart gas.)
He explains how it’s a LNG is really fucking everyone over. Some points: ~ NG infrastructure is leaky and causes lots of non-point-source pollution. ~ Methane was supposed to be a transitional energy source as we moved towards renewables, but instead we’re leaning heavily on methane while China is securing all the science patents and materials for solar. ~ LNG is super inefficient. I think like 20% of it is used up in the liquification process, which is required for transit overseas. This is to sell it to nations abroad. ~ Since we’re really trying to get to renewables, everyone buying LNG is a jerk, and everyone selling it is also a jerk. ~ If even one of these supertankers has a rupture incident, it will fuck the Earth, and I’ll be sore as I watch wildfire ravage California, and by east coast buddies get hammered by hurricanes. Also we’ll be closer to permanent drought and then global famine. ~ Seriously, Methane is bad. NG infrastructure should be moved away from as quickly as possible. LNG is really extra super bad, and can ruin our kids’ futures.
- Comment on Caveman technology 1 month ago:
Around 2010-ish someone made a supercut of all the times in thriller cinema the phone service disconnected, since writers still felt the need to close the circle.
So I got the idea for a mystery / slasher / thriller called Cell Plan based on the family cell provider plans at the time, where groups were discounted more based on the size of the group.
A group of teens / young adults get a giant group cell plan right before their vacation out at Camp Scream. It’s a great plan with great connectivity, and everyone can even see where everyone else’s phone is on their GPS / Map service.
Moreover, the cell service never fails throughout the story, even in places that it shouldn’t work (no explanation, nothing supernatural, just that communication blackouts are not part of this story). People might even think it’s bizarre when they’re way out in Whispering Lake or down in the Bloody Mines, in places where service normally cuts out.
And then throw bunches of cell phone tropes that elevate the suspense: The first victim’s phone is found before her body is. One couple who sneaked off together get split up but take each other’s phones. Someone forgets their phone back at the cabin, which is then grabbed by the killer (who then uses it to get close to a victim). The killer is holding someone’s phone and stalking a running teen while another one sees them on the map and is giving directions.
Eventually, they’ll do all the open-circle things: Call the police (they’ll show up an hour or two later), call family, maybe even get help from an expert to get the power on again.
- Comment on Take Your Perks Where You Can 1 month ago:
My elementary school in Colorado toured a Wonder Bread factory and yeah nothing is tastier than warm bread fresh out of the oven. We stuffed ourselves with hot-dog bun defects.