Zagorath
@Zagorath@aussie.zone
- Comment on Aussie funk music recommendations? 12 hours ago:
My man, if you “don’t even know what funk is”, that ain’t cos you’re old.
(Not knowing the specific bands could be.)
- Comment on Chinwag's age verification process 13 hours ago:
SSO/federated identity would be terrible for this. One of the biggest things people are criticising this idea for is the privacy implication. Somebody, in the current law, has to obtain private information on the user, such as footage of their face or their driver’s licence. Depending on how it’s implemented, the verifier might or might not be able to see details about your accounts on other sites or which sites you have accounts on. But in SSO, the verifier (or “identity provider”) must necessarily have that information. It would require whoever the identity provider is to have properly verified your age, and then every social media site (or, if this were a porn thing like in the US and UK, every porn site—in either case, this is the “service provider”) would redirect you via the identity provider, so the IdP knows which SPs you’re visiting.
- Comment on Reddit plans to unify its search interface as it looks to become a search engine | TechCrunch 1 day ago:
The site that prominently poisend many Google AI summaries
The site that made huge bank by selling API access to Google so Google could poison its own search results with shitty AI summaries.
- Comment on Chinwag's age verification process 1 day ago:
This is unironically a good method. It ensures privacy by breaking any traceability between a person getting verified and the verification being provided to a site. The verifier sees your ID and declares that yes, you are of legal age. They give you a token that says “the bearer of this token was verified”. The token is provided to a site. The site can see that you were verified, but learns nothing more about you.
It’s literally how blinded digital signatures would work, which should be the only way that this kind of thing gets done, if it really has to get done at all. Not uploading your photo ID directly to a site, or to a verifier who partners directly with the site. Certainly not completely unreliable face recognition bullshit. Or to make the analogy slightly more accurate, it would be like if you signed your username on an empty bottle, put the bottle in an opaque brown paper bag, took the bottle to the bottle-o, and they filled up the bottle with alcohol without removing it from the bag (so they can’t read the username), after verifying your age. Obviously filling up empty containers isn’t a thing bottle-os do, but hypothetically if it were, this would be the analogy.
- Comment on GOG and game publishers launch FreedomToBuy.games to raise awareness on censorship in gaming – GOG Pressroom 1 day ago:
I found this solution worked for me in Australia. It involved clicking a link to add the bundle to my cart, and then another link to check out, rather than going through the normal process.
- Comment on GOG and game publishers launch FreedomToBuy.games to raise awareness on censorship in gaming – GOG Pressroom 2 days ago:
I found this solution worked for me in Australia. It involved clicking a link to add the bundle to my cart, and then another link to check out, rather than going through the normal process.
- Comment on GOG and game publishers launch FreedomToBuy.games to raise awareness on censorship in gaming – GOG Pressroom 2 days ago:
Ironically (or perhaps completely unironically) the bundle requires a very weird workaround to get it to work in Australia.
Anyway, I redeemed it and got all those games added to my account. I doubt I’ll ever even install any of them tbh, but I just felt like saying “screw you” to my compatriot.
- Comment on Australians, especially men, are reading less than ever before 3 days ago:
I have to agree with @jjjalljs@ttrpg.network. I have seen the perspective that @Longmactoppedup@aussie.zone, yourself, and others have shared many times, and obviously I haven’t been in your lives to know exactly why you think that way, but I can’t help but think that you they had an exceptionally bad high school English teacher, or just completely failed to understand what your teachers were saying.
You should never be “making up some deep meaning”. You’re reading the text and working out what meaning is contained in the text. This might have been meaning intentionally put there by the author, but it also might have been subconsciously done by the author because of their own life experience and the culture in which they live, or even something that becomes possible to interpret out of the text based on the reader’s lived experience which may not have made sense as an interpretation when and where the author wrote it. Often a combination of all three.
Recognising how a text can contain ideas that carry more meaning that just the surface leaving reading adds so much depth and meaning to them. How a text can actually say something about the real world and the people within it. Reflect our hopes and fears. Reinforce or reject society’s norms and mores.
I’m reading Dracula right now, as part of a book club in !vampires@lemmy.zip, and it’s one of my favourite books because of the many possible readings and themes contained within it. Its commentary on “women’s place in the world” (as @jjjalljs@ttrpg.network put it) is an incredibly strong one. The difference between Mina and Lucy; the one engaged and later married to her one love and completely chaste, the other a rather more sexually free woman (by Victorian standards) who receives three marriage proposals in one day, and regrets “why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” This latter is the one turned into a vampire who, as a woman vampire, feeds on children and babies, unlike the titular male vampire who feeds on adults. But before she is turned, she receives blood transfusions from each of those three suitors. I’m sure there’s no possible subtext in that: the three men who loved her each, in turn, injecting their bodily fluids into her in the aim of giving her life.
And it’s not limited to books. Film and television are literature too. As I write this I’m watching a video (not available on YouTube yet) that does literary analysis on my favourite TV show, Avatar the Last Airbender. A show I love precisely because of how deep and ripe for thematic analysis it is. Earlier today I had a chance to ramble some of my favourite themes at an unfortunately uninterested audience in a thread on Lemmy. Earlier this year, discussion about Star Wars: Andor was very popular because it is full of themes with very obvious applicability today. Heck, learning how to analyse literature can help you better appreciate dumb meme stories shared on the Internet.
If you didn’t learn an appreciation for literary analysis in school, you have my sincerest pity. Because it adds so much richness to the world when you can do it.
- Comment on And nothing of value was lost 3 days ago:
here it’s often presumed that it’s the car’s fault
By people and the media, or by the law? Because those are definitely not the same.
Though unfortunately in most of the anglosphere, the answer is that the average person will presume it’s the *non-*car-driver’s fault, and the law will make no presumption either way (which has the effect of letting drivers get off).
Moreover, the law now specifies that DUI is a criminal offense even when no incident occurred and blood level of alcohol is above 0.8 g/l
Wow that’s really cool! Is 0.8 g/L the only level of BAC that’s used in Italian law? Or are there like, other lower thresholds with less legal severity? I ask because, assuming 0.8 g/L is the same as a 0.08% BAC, that seems really high. For context, in carbrained Australia the limit is .05.
- Comment on Avatar (the one with the blue aliens) is such a weird franchise 3 days ago:
The thing is, I don’t think it’s a matter of opinion to say that the movie didn’t deliver what the show did. There’s a lot of subjective opinions about the artistic decisions of the movie, but there’s also just the objective fact that it did not cover most of the important character and worldbuilding beats. It couldn’t. 100 minutes of film just isn’t enough to have the same depth of character development and worldbuilding 60 episodes of television did. Or even to cover what 17 episodes (the 20 episodes in season 1, minus the three I said are mostly skippable) did.
- Comment on Old Testament shit. Sinners BEWARE! 3 days ago:
The blue is on the left, from Jesus’ perspective.
- Comment on And nothing of value was lost 4 days ago:
That’s brilliant.
Honestly I’d push for a change in law such that a crash between a car and a more vulnerable road user is legally presumed to be the car’s fault unless evidence is provided to the contrary. The big problem we’ve had far too many times where I live, and in many other parts of the world, is that because you can’t prove the driver was riding negligently (or more to the point: because you can’t convince a car-brained jury pool or judge panel to find that they were negligent), far too often they get off scott-free.
- Comment on Avatar (the one with the blue aliens) is such a weird franchise 4 days ago:
What I think most people like about the worldbuilding is the rich believable cultures that manage to be very obviously inspired by real-world Asian cultures, without being either caricatures or carbon copies. That it has a magic system that is woven seamlessly through the society of the world and doesn’t at all feel like “a medieval society with magic added on as an afterthought”. That the magic system itself does a great job of providing examples for all three of Sanderson’s Laws, being a robust hard magic system with very obvious limitations that gets explored in depth through things like ice and blood and lightning as believable extensions of what already exists. Revelations that make you go “oh yeah, of course!” and “holy shit that’s cool!” simultaneously.
In terms of characters, Aang’s certainly not the most interesting. I think it’s a bit more interesting than you give it credit for, because it’s not just an “unwilling messiah”, but it’s a literal child who’s forced to be a saviour. Not the teenager or young adult that you’d get with most YA fiction, but someone very much characterised as a young child forced to grow up too early. Themes of loss of innocence and the tragedy of war get explored well through him. But as I said, he’s not really the focus.
Zuko is. Zuko’s character arc is frequently cited as one of the best redemption arcs in fiction, and for good reason. It’s one of the best written, most believable arcs I’ve seen. He starts out a bad guy, because he was born on the side of the bad guys. But we later learn that he was banished because he stood up for the little guy. And even though banished, he doesn’t suddenly change the allegiances he’s grown up with his whole life. He believes he can restore his honour by aiding the bad guys and taking out the main good guy. Of course it’s actually a rather classic case of “he needed to find acceptance from within and stop seeking external validation”, which is a well-trod trope, but it’s his path to get there that’s great. Thanks to his contact with the good guys, and the helpful but non-pushy guidance of his uncle, he slowly comes to appreciate that he can be better. But it’s rather shallow and focused on just himself, not on understanding that the ruler of the bad guys is a bad guy. And so when the ruler welcomes him back, he goes. It’s not a smooth curve from bad guy to good guy, there’s a very prominent relapse along the way, due in part to the misaligned reason for his initial growth.
Other characters are also great. Azula’s tragic descent into madness, shown as an extremely believable progression resulting from traits she exhibited in her very first scenes. The understanding that Ozai might be irredeemable because he’s been steeped in the evil of the Fire Nation his whole life, but that the war didn’t start out like that: Sozin was ego-driven and insane, but ultimately got there because of his tragic friendship with Roku turning sour after he was just spreading his nation’s prosperity. Not a redeeming quality by any means, but an understandable one. There’s Hama; captured and tortured for years until she got the chance to turn the tables and became the torturer. And of course, Iroh. So much could be said about Iroh.
Of course there are other things outside of that. The music is sublime. The representation is great—I’ve already mentioned the fact that it’s focused on Asian and indigenous cultures, but also for people with a variety of different disabilities. The fact that it balances tone incredibly well with its serious moments and the light-hearted humour. The fact that it is, without a doubt, a children’s show that nonetheless does not condescend to kids, and even manages to have depth enough to attract a lot of adults (and know personally multiple, as well as having seen stories of people online, who were first introduced to it as adults, so it’s not just nostalgia).
I just…yeah. I cannot say enough good things about it.
- Comment on And nothing of value was lost 5 days ago:
Go go gadget archive.ph[1] !
No luck.
- Comment on Avatar (the one with the blue aliens) is such a weird franchise 5 days ago:
Say what you will about Disney, they know how to make a theme park experience.
The only Disney park I’ve been to is Hong Kong. And to be honest, it was a very subpar experience. Much worse than the other parks I’ve been to like Movie World & Dreamworld in Australia, or Lotte World in Korea.
- Comment on Avatar (the one with the blue aliens) is such a weird franchise 5 days ago:
So the studio decided to just pretend that everyone wants more, and the entertainment media repeats it so the studio stays happy and tells them things.
I think you just described a non-political example of manufactured consent.
- Comment on Avatar (the one with the blue aliens) is such a weird franchise 5 days ago:
I didn’t like the art style of the cartoon
Hard to say much about that. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. Personally, with the exception of a few moments where it goes “all anime” (because personally, I cannot stand anime, and have never found a single anime show that I could stand to watch for very long, in part because of the preponderance of ridiculous over-the-top reactions)
Three screenshots from Avatar showing over-the-top anime-style reactions
I find Avatar to be one of the most beautifully-animated shows out there. Especially in moments like the climax of Crossroads of Destiny or during the Last Agni Kai.
the movie cut out what amounts to about 11 hours of padding
This I could not disagree with more strongly. And I don’t think this is opinion, but pretty solid fact. There’s a little padding for sure, but on the whole Avatar is an incredible example of how to do serialised storytelling well. With very little exception, every episode makes some major steps towards advancing the main story, deepening the characters, or deepening the worldbuilding to help heighten the stakes. Usually at least 2 of the 3. The first season is definitely the worst in this regard with episodes like The King of Omashu (which adds some worldbuilding that is important later, but is otherwise not a brilliantly-utilised episode), The Great Divide (an infamous joke within the community), and The Fortuneteller (whose only real redeeming quality is its role in effectively kicking off the romance arc). But in a 20-episode season, and for a show where this is the worst season, that’s a pretty damn good record.
but I think the point of their spirits being broken is even more pronounced when they’re literally on ground
That’s something that could be a good point, but the movie doesn’t really do anything to show why their spirits are broken.
The episode does a great job of this, by showing that even once Aang provides them with coal to earthbend, they are too broken to take it up right away. In the movie the prisoners outnumber their guards, and always have done, and there’s nothing stopping them using their powers whatsoever, either in theory or in the narrative.
And in fact, I think when it’s one smallish scene within a much larger movie, it’s always inevitably going to be hard to adequately “show, don’t tell” why the prison is able to break their spirits despite being surrounded by earth. So ironically, this is something that, if they wanted to do it, a longer runtime in a show is what could have made it work.
I watched that episode just for Sulu voicing the bad guy
It really does have a spectacular voice cast. Outside the core cast, Mark Hamill, René Auberjonois, Jason Isaacs, and Clancy Brown are also among those really worth mentioning.
- Comment on Avatar (the one with the blue aliens) is such a weird franchise 5 days ago:
Ok I’m trying to be as open minded as possible here, but…how?
- Comment on Avatar (the one with the blue aliens) is such a weird franchise 5 days ago:
It didn’t help that it came out around the same time as the ATLA movie.
- Comment on Avatar (the one with the blue aliens) is such a weird franchise 5 days ago:
There is no movie in Ba Sing Se.
There also is no live action TV adaptation.
- Comment on Avatar (the one with the blue aliens) is such a weird franchise 5 days ago:
Pretty sure it now has a theme park or something, doesn’t it?
It’s bizarre how much “stuff” there is for the blue people Avatar franchise, considering what a tiny lasting cultural impact the original movie had.
The original movie was an incredible tech demo. It was an utterly forgettable movie. I had no desire to bother watching the sequel.
- Comment on And nothing of value was lost 5 days ago:
there was an old redditism that the best way to get off with murder is to use your car
Not a redditism. An urbinist-ism. Reddit had a healthy contingent of urbanists, but you’ll find us here on Lemmy too, over at !fuckcars@lemmy.world, or !urbanism@slrpnk.net. (Or, frankly, because it’s a movement with significant overlap to anticapitalism, just all around the threadiverse.)
And it’s completely true, too. I can easily think of half a dozen cases where someone killed someone else with a car and got away scott-free in my country alone (in fact: with just one exception, the ones that come to my mind are all in my city alone). And only one of those cases even went to court as far as I know.
- Comment on Signal boss warns app will exit Australia if forced to hand over users’ encrypted messages 5 days ago:
- Comment on Signal boss warns app will exit Australia if forced to hand over users’ encrypted messages 5 days ago:
ASIO (aus federal police)
I mean, sort of? The Australian Federal Police would be the Australian federal police (the hint is in the name!). But it’s true that ASIO does take on many roles that in America are done by the FBI, while AFP does more typical things associated with policing.
- Comment on Signal boss warns app will exit Australia if forced to hand over users’ encrypted messages 5 days ago:
Threema is a good option. Not an easy option, but a good one. It uses the Signal protocol, but your private key stays on your device, and you manaage which users you trust to save their public key for communicating with them yourself, including giving three levels of verification for (1) if it’s a random person and you have no way of verifying who they are, (2) if it’s a person whose ID matches someone in your address book, and (3) if it’s someone you’ve met in person and scanned a verifying QR code.
- Comment on Mater Hospital's religious abortion ban left couple feeling 'abandoned' 1 week ago:
A first step would be to remove all public funding for hospitals that are refusing to provide medical care.
And while we’re at it, GPs. In the city it might not be a problem if your GP refuses to prescribe contraceptives, but if you’re out in the country with no GP within a 6 hour round trip, that sort of thing can be pretty significant. If you’re receiving Medicare subsidies, you need to provide all relevant healthcare, not refuse on the basis of your own personal non-medical beliefs.
- Submitted 1 week ago to australia@aussie.zone | 5 comments
- Comment on If the economics of broadening or lifting Australia’s GST are challenging, the politics are horrendous 1 week ago:
I could maybe accept increasing the GST if it came with a significant narrowing. Any talk of broadening the GST is a complete non-starter for me. But if you changed it such that like 90% of people’s necessary daily/weekly/monthly expenses were exempt, including Internet & electricity bills, most clothing, all necessary (including socially necessary) health and sanitation products (soap, shampoo, household cleaning products, toilet paper, etc.), and low-emission transportation. Then maybe I’d be ok with an increase to 15% on the products that are left.
But for some reason every time they talk about GST, it’s always about broadening it. Ridiculous.
- Comment on YouTube makes last-ditch attempt to lobby government against inclusion in under-16s social media ban 1 week ago:
Jesus Christ this whole thing is such an undemocratic farce. When the bill was presented before Parliament, we (as well as *the Members of Parliament who voted to pass this) were specifically told that it would not apply to YouTube.
So they’ve rushed it through Parliament without giving the public time to provide proper feedback or even giving themselves time to properly consider the feedback that was given. They passed it without having any clear idea of how it would work in practice, and by the sounds of it so far that’s basically because it won’t work. And now we find out that the Government pushed the Parliament to pass it by lying about its scope.
Every single thing about this is completely fucked.
- Comment on YouTube makes last-ditch attempt to lobby government against inclusion in under-16s social media ban 1 week ago:
YouTube has an 18+ category that requires you be signed in with an age-verified account, but that’s separate from the “YouTube Kids” system, which restricts a bunch of functionality on videos marked as “for kids” by making you unable to use playlists, leave comments, or view in the mini-player while browsing elsewhere.
