WatDabney
@WatDabney@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on Recommendations on casual GB/GBA games? 1 month ago:
The BitGenerations games on the GBA, and especially Orbital. They’re stylish but graphically simple arcade style games - generally some combination of puzzle-solving and action.
- Comment on What you need to know about the Venezuelan gang that Texas is targeting 2 months ago:
What you need to know is that the government is corrupt and works almost exclusively for the benefit of the wealthy few, which has caused considerable problems for everyone else, which problems they want you to blame on someone other than them.
- Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane? 2 months ago:
Hexbear is sort of like a village of eldritch abomination worshippers in a Lovecraftian horror story - isolated, insular, entirely wrapped up in their own esoteric rituals and ideas and language, and immediately and collectively hostile to outsiders.
- Comment on The New York Times turns on Kamala Harris and slams her as 'a phony' 2 months ago:
The reliably liberal New York Times…
lol
- Comment on UK | Police believe strip-searching children can be effective, but suspicions of misuse remain 2 months ago:
“Effective! Oooh know what I mean? Know what I mean? Nudge nudge! Know what I mean? Say no more!”
- Comment on The Elon / Trump interview on X started with an immediate tech disaster 3 months ago:
Yes - that’s exactly what it is. Vichy Twitter is to historical Twitter as Vichy France was to historical France.
- Comment on The Elon / Trump interview on X started with an immediate tech disaster 3 months ago:
I stole it myself, so you’re welcome to it.
I have no idea who originated it, but from the first time I saw it, I haven’t used anything else. It just so perfectly sums it up.
- Comment on The Elon / Trump interview on X started with an immediate tech disaster 3 months ago:
So there are only two possibilities - either Vichy Twitter is such a poorly run site that it crashed on its own, or it’s such a poorly run site that it’s not prepared to deal with being DDOSed.
- Comment on He really wants to kill that platform lol 3 months ago:
This is just the latest in a long string. Spez has demonstrated repeatedly throughout the years that he’s an entitled cretin - equal parts smug and ignorant.
My personal favorite was when he snidely commented on Reddit’s unprofitability in his AMA after the API debacle, making it sound as if it was somehow our fault, only to then not only have it made common knowledge that the official app was useless garbage and had been for years, but that the entirety of Reddit’s loss for the year was just about exactly equal to his salary alone.
- Comment on Some subreddits could be paywalled, hints Reddit CEO 3 months ago:
Altruistic? ALTRUISTIC?!
Just who in the fuck does he think he is?!
The only altruists on Reddit are the users who freely provided the content that this fucking parasite feeds off of.
I’m so glad I left that awful shithole of a site.
- Comment on Manufactured consent coming through 3 months ago:
…it’s not like hezbollahs militants have decent trigger discipline
Except that they do, demonstrably and consistently.
Israel isn’t going to let an opportunity to try to gain international sympathy go unremarked, yet in spite of the fact that Hezbollah has launched thousands of attacks on Israeli targets at the border in recent months, even resulting in 33 recorded civilian casualties, this is the first one that Israel has been able to at all successfully milk for sympathy. That indicates significant discipline and restraint - to not only confine themselves to military targets, but to do so so consistently that the Israeli propaganda machine hasn’t even been able to successfully pretend otherwise, until now.
- Comment on Manufactured consent coming through 3 months ago:
Yeah - this whole situation reeks.
Israel rarely misses an opportunity to try to provoke Lebanon into a war, and they ramped up their efforts on the heels of the Gaza invasion, and have been notably aggressive about it in the last month or two. And Lebanon has consistently refused to rise to the bait.
And now, literally from out of nowhere, Hezbollah launches a rocket at a children’s sports field for no discernible reason?
Bullshit. I have zero doubt that Israelis launched that attack, in a cynical and murderous attempt to trigger the war they so transparently have been trying to start. They’re clearly - obviously - the only ones who could possibly benefit from it, they’ve been trying to provoke a war with Lebanon for months now to no avail and they self-evidently have no morals or principles and will kill anyone to get what they want. Everything points to the same conclusion - Israel did it.
- Comment on I don’t understand quantum physics 4 months ago:
I’m often reminded of a cartoon I saw years ago, with a stereotypical Einsteinish physicist standing in front of a chalkboard, looking at this enormously complex formula with a big blank space in the middle of it. Then he gets a “eureka” expression and starts writing in the blank space. Then he steps back, and you can see that he’s filled the blank space with “and then something happens”.
- Comment on When people say two things "cannot be compared", they had to compare them to come to this conclusion. Are 'dissimilar' or 'unequal' better words? 4 months ago:
I take “cannot be compared” to be a sort of shorthand claim - they aren’t actually asserting that the two thongs literally cannot be compared at all, but that they cannot be compared meaningfully or relevantly.
- Comment on What is your least favorite retro video game? 4 months ago:
There are a bajillion crappy old games that I actually didlike more, but none of those would be interesting answers.
Of games that are generally well-regarded, so the gap between my opinion and the common opinion is largest, I’d have to say Final Fantasy Tactics.
- Comment on Z-Library admins on the lam ahead of US extradition; officials shocked 4 months ago:
It’s a hosting site for free ebooks.
The site admins don’t provide any of the ebooks themselves - they just host files that are uploaded by whoever wishes, and provide for downloads for whoever wishes. (Not that that alters its legal status - just by way of explanation).
It’s notably popular among college students, as a source to download free versions of obscenely overpriced textbooks.
- Comment on Israel has approved ‘largest West Bank land grab in 30 years’, watchdog says 4 months ago:
There’s nothing I can add to that, so all I’ll do is signal my complete agreement.
On second thought…
That last bit neatly illustrates why it was that, in the face of the utter failure of both of the establishment hacks who were set to get the nominations in 2016, and the support in both parties for populists, the GOP went along with their populist while the DNC sabotaged theirs.
The GOP accurately saw Trump as an entirely unprincipled and wholly narcissistic idiot who could be manipulated into serving their interests, while the DNC equally accurately saw Sanders as a man of principles and determination who could not be manipulated into serving theirs.
- Comment on Israel has approved ‘largest West Bank land grab in 30 years’, watchdog says 4 months ago:
And I ask again - exactly how the fuck does Israel “approve” the forcible annexation of Palestinian land?
Israel self-evidently, by definition, has no legitimate jurisdiction over Palestinian land, and can’t “approve” anything regarding it.
I grow more convinced every day that if there are future historians, they’re going to dub our current age something like “the Lunatic Age” - the regrettable and inexplicable period in human history during which, for no discernible reason from the point of view of a future civilization, in spite of worldwide communication and thus the full awareness of the extent of it, people largely stood idly by in the face of, and in all too many cases actually supported, the profound and undeniable evil of governments, politicians and business leaders.
- Comment on Photographers Push Back on Facebook's 'Made with AI' Labels Triggered by Adobe Metadata. Do you agree “‘AI was used in this image’ is completely different than ‘Made with AI’”? 4 months ago:
No - I don’t agree that they’re completely different.
“Made by AI” would be completely different.
“Made with AI” actually means pretty much the exact same thing as “AI was used in this image” - it’s just that the former lays it out baldly and the latter softens the impact by using indirect language.
I can certainly see how “photographers” who use AI in their images would tend to prefer the latter, but bluntly, fuck 'em. If they can’t handle the shame of the fact that they did so they should stop doing it - get up off their asses and invest some tome and effort into doing it all themselves. And if they can’t manage that, they should stop pretending to be artists.
- Comment on NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense 4 months ago:
I’m roundaboutly reminded of one of my favorite novels - Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.
It’s a science fiction story about the end of the world. The proximate cause of the end is all of the landmasses of Earth being smothered by a gigantic and very aggressive strain of Bermuda grass, but the real cause is the utter and complete failure, due to ignorance, greed, selfishness, short-sightedness, incompetence, arrogance and so on, of every attempt to combat it.
- Comment on Favourite patient modern game? 4 months ago:
Dredge.
A very simple concept and gameplay loop that expands out into the bizarre and fantastic.
Honorable mention: Ronin.
Bullet time, effectively turn-based ninja combat. Simple, regularly autosaved “go until you die, then try something different” gameplay loop and just a helluva lot of fun.
Honorable mention: Valley.
Smooth first-person mecahanically-enhanced parkouring along the way to investigating the mysteries - both ancient and more recent - of a unique and very picturesque valley.
- Comment on Brexit Britain wants to be the snooping capital of the West 6 months ago:
England’s already the snooping capital of the west, isn’t it?
It seems that every time a new privacy-invading technology comes floating down the pike, England just instantly adopts it. They don’t even hesitate -it’s like, “Ooh… new survellance technology? I’ll take that one and that one and that one and… you know what? Just give me the lot!”
And every time, I cynically reflect on the fact that Orwell was English.
- Comment on Hamas and Iran celebrate anti-Gaza war protests taking US colleges by storm 6 months ago:
Is there still anyone in your office from the old RipplingRiver days on IMDb?
- Comment on Hamas and Iran celebrate anti-Gaza war protests taking US colleges by storm 6 months ago:
A cynically unsurprising article.
When you’re determined to condemn someone who has the moral high ground, guilt by association is the most effective fallacy.
- Comment on Iran launches drones at Israel in retaliatory attack - BBC News 7 months ago:
This isn’t a military action - it’s political theater.
- Comment on Armies of bots battled on Twitter over Chinese spy balloon incident 9 months ago:
No surprise there.
There was never even the slightest chance that that balloon could pass through US airspace unobserved, and China possesses FAR more effective, secure and difficult-at-best methods with which to spy. So very obviously, it was intended to be discovered. And presuming that to be the case, the important bit then was the reaction its discovery would trigger.
So it was safe to presume from the start (as I did) that some significant part of the social media noise about it was simple astroturfing explicitly intended solely to further whatever response whoever wanted.
- Comment on People buried at 'mega' stone tombs in Spain were defleshed and their bones fractured after death 11 months ago:
Is it bad that I’m cynically unsurprised that this was in Spain?