Zagorath
@Zagorath@aussie.zone
- Comment on Witcher 1&2 are probably worth playing 3 days ago:
Witcher 1 is the only game in the franchise I’ve actually played. And I definitely agree, it’s very worth playing. I was really enjoying it. The only reason I never ended up finishing was that at the time I was playing through a Wineskin, and…the damn game was crashing on me every hour at most. Which was pretty appalling considering I was playing on a platform that Steam said was officially supported…
But I have no doubt that if I had been running on Windows at the time I’d have finished it back around 2014 when I was first playing it, because I was really enjoying the story.
- Comment on DOJ to ask judge to force Google to sell off Chrome, Bloomberg News reports 3 days ago:
Agree. One place to start would be that the company that sells ads (Google Ads) should not be the same as the ones that buy ads (Search, YouTube, etc.).
- Submitted 1 week ago to australia@aussie.zone | 4 comments
- Comment on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu says he and Donald Trump 'see eye to eye' on Iran 1 week ago:
No idea how many abstained, or of those that abstained, how many did so because of the Biden/Harris administration’s support for the ongoing genocide.
But 3rd party? Even if 100% of the third party votes —even those who voted Libertarian or for that antivax nutter, who probably would have leaned Trump before Harris in reality anyway—had instead gone to Harris, Trump still would have won both the EC and the popular vote. 3rd party votes probably were a deciding factor in 2016 and they were definitely a deciding factor in 2000. But not this time.
- Comment on Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add? 1 week ago:
You’re not wrong, but Howard’s was a very different matter, because he started the institutional vilification of refugees by making the public aware of what was previously (to use Morrison’s language) on-water matters.
- Comment on The country is done for 1 week ago:
Wow, that was…something. Completely dumps the rhyming “ee”. If kids are having trouble with understanding elemeno, a better solution (IMO anyway, as someone who is not in any way an early learning educator) would be to just be more staccato with annunciating the l. m. n. o. peee.
- Comment on The country is done for 1 week ago:
So does it no longer go to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star?
- Comment on The country is done for 1 week ago:
Oh very well done, you found the one dictionary that limits the definition of ball to spherical objects. That, unfortunately, makes that dictionary wrong, because a dictionary’s job is to describe language as it is used, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in good faith who does not call the ball used in Australian football, American football, or the two rugby codes, a ball. Oxford does a much better job:
a solid or hollow spherical or egg-shaped object that is kicked, thrown, or hit in a game.
And so does (unsurprisingly, since it has the tendency to be the most complete source for a lot of words) Wiktionary:
An object that is the focus of many sports and games, in which it may be thrown, caught, kicked, bounced, rolled, chased, retrieved, hit with an instrument, spun, etc., usually roughly spherical or ovoid but whose size, weight, bounciness, colour, etc. differ according to the game
The history is actually interesting. The story you told is one I’ve heard before and at one point believed myself (though I’ve never heard someone take the inflammatory tone of calling it “cheating”, so much as it usually being described as him being so wrapped up in the heat of the moment). But it’s not quite right.
The truth is that prior to the mid 19th century many different forms of “football” were played across England, and whenever teams from two different areas wanted to play each other they would have to agree on a set of rules. It may have been sort of like how International Rules Football today is a compromise ruleset between Australian and Gaelic football. Then in the early to mid 19th century specific codes started to coalesce and become more standardised. Rugby has its first written standard ruleset in 1845, and what we know today as soccer followed shortly after in 1863 with the formation of the Football Association (from which soccer takes its name).
For a time between the formation of the FA and its first finalised Laws of the Game, rugby clubs remained members, but following a decision to remove the draft rules that would allow carrying the ball after “he makes a fair catch, or catches the ball on the first bound”, rugby and soccer went their separate ways and eventually evolved into the sports we know today. (Incidentally, while I knew the information from the previous paragraph already, apart from specific dates, this whole paragraph was entirely new to me in looking up those dates just now.)
The use of the term “football” for all these sports, incidentally, comes from the fact that they are propelled forward on foot, rather than on horseback as in polo, or with a racket as in tennis. The origins of football sports are so intermixed it is impossible to say that one inherently has a better claim than any other. I would certainly not claim an Englishman is wrong for calling it football. But in this country, it has always been soccer, because we have our own local football codes.
- Comment on The country is done for 1 week ago:
Huh?
- Comment on The country is done for 2 weeks ago:
Tell me you have no understanding of the history of football sports without…
Also that you don’t know what the word “ball” means.
- Comment on Upgrade incoming 2 weeks ago:
Yeah it’s kinda disappointing from a technical perspective, but I guess threading it is easier. Less need to worry about conflicts like replies not arriving before the comment they’re replying to, or one edit arriving after a later edit.
- Comment on The country is done for 2 weeks ago:
Zee, candy, cookies. All that American language creeping in shits me.
And yet we also see “football” being used more and more often to refer to soccer. The one time Australian culture and American culture should be in sync, some of us decided to copy the bloody poms.
- Comment on The country is done for 2 weeks ago:
America is the country’s short/familiar name. Like how the Commonwealth of Australia is just called Australia, the United Mexican States is called Mexico, and the Republic of China is called Taiwan.
- Comment on Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add? 2 weeks ago:
I think I could have agreed with you on Howard except for two things. Children overboard was not just had in itself, but it basically set Australia on its now 20 year history of politicisation of refugees’ lives. It was bad enough in its own right, but looking at the long term ramifications of his actions, I rate him as one of the worst we’ve ever had, even if he’s not quite in contention for the #1 spot.
Turnbull I agree with you. In an alternate universe he could have been one of the best LNP leaders we’ve ever had. But the fact is that he had no spine and was more than willing to throw the country and his own personal beliefs aside for the sake of retaining power, and I cannot forgive him for that.
- Comment on Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add? 2 weeks ago:
I would think that if something were established with legislation capping how much can be spent, it would (a) be very difficult to get past the Senate crossbench and (b) be very expensive in terms of political capital, if you didn’t take it to an election as a core issue.
- Comment on Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add? 2 weeks ago:
Oh yeah Fraser was definitely not good for the country. But compared to every Liberal who came after him?
- Comment on Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add? 2 weeks ago:
Don’t make the mistake of falling for Abbott’s image. He was a very clever and calculating man who knew exactly what he was doing.
- Comment on Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add? 2 weeks ago:
It’s definitely a competition between Abbott and Morrison.
You could make an argument for Fraser, but that would be purely on the fact that he got into power initially in a completely undemocratic foreign-backed coup. His actual governing was relatively reasonable.
- Comment on We should defederate lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago:
Not an especially helpful answer because the point is the way that their existence makes Lemmy in general and aussie.zone in particular a much worse experience for newcomers that demonstrably drives away people from joining. Putting it down to pErsOnAL rESponsiBILity never works to solve a problem.
- Comment on We should defederate lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago:
I didn’t even know there was an active asklemmy on LW, because its federation issues mean it never shows up in my feed.
- Comment on We should defederate lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago:
I think the point touched on by @Eyekaytee@aussie.zone below is one of the best ones. Being federated with ML, like Hexbear and Lemmygrad (only the last of which we have defederated already) innately exposes our users to some of the worst the site has to offer in terms of pro-authoritarian bias.
Ask anyone who got over the technical hurdles and questions like “what’s that? Why should I use it? How do I make an account?” and started using Lemmy, but then left and stopped engaging why they did so. One of the top two reasons (the other being the amount of content) is probably about the amount of tanky bias and the poor behaviour of tankies. For example, this is one of the most recent posts on the subreddit for Lemmy wherein the same admin I was complaining about above doxed a user who disagreed with them.
If we want Lemmy to grow and be a good place for our users and prospective users, we need to, as @trk said, not tolerate the intolerance which is the default position on ML.
- Comment on We should defederate lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago:
The problem is that there’s no incentive for anyone to create or use similar communities on other instances if the one on ML is currently the biggest. The more people defederate ML the better the chance that an AskLemmy or similar community can actually be successful on another instance. Somewhere that criticism of authoritarianism doesn’t get you banned.
- Comment on We should defederate lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago:
Also, that post was always going to attract hardliners from all sides
The problem isn’t the existence of hardliners. It’s the clear ignoring of their own rules removing perfectly good comments that disagree with their line, while the admins themselves and people who agree with their view can get away with anything.
- Comment on We should defederate lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago:
Have you messaged the admin for an explanation
The admin literally replied to me when I reported the disrespectful comments (which at the time I didn’t realise were being made by the admin) saying “Good luck with that” and then proceeding to be disrespectful directly to me.
- Comment on We should defederate lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago:
Side note: here’s a nice bit of light reading on tolerating intolerance. And not tolerating tolerance.
Right, which is exactly why they should be defederated. They don’t even follow their own rules and go out of their way to be arseholes to everyone, as long as they perceive it to be something that pushes their agenda.
- Comment on We should defederate lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago:
Tell that to the admins of ml.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to meta@aussie.zone | 35 comments
- Comment on Alternate Web UI for aussie.zone 3 weeks ago:
For me the biggest advantage of old UI on Reddit was with what RES could provide in terms of keyboard shortcuts etc. Since this doesn’t seem to have that, for me I don’t see a whole lot of value.
- Comment on No-fault evictions banned and break-lease fees capped under sweeping reforms in Victoria 3 weeks ago:
I Qld they introduced laws “banning” no grounds evictions. But here one of the “grounds” is “end of lease”. Which has simply meant that every lease is accompanied by an automatic eviction notice, which will be rescinded upon re-signing a new lease. Completely undermines the government’s efforts.
- Comment on There is only 1 choice 3 weeks ago:
Gonna be honest, I only vaguely recognise the name Patrick Swayze without knowing exactly what he’s famous for. An actor, I think? And I have zero idea who Paul Walker is. Anomalocarus I gather from context is an extinct animal of some sort, which is cool, but I lack the knowledge to know precisely why this specific species is highly valuable.
So Robin Williams gets my vote almost by default, even if I didn’t have more reason to choose him beyond that.