Interesting. I always loved how they fit the musical entries into the story in a way that it makes sense that everyone is singing all of the sudden, lol

Iain M. Banks’ Culture.

I’m deathly afraid of the day some big studio manages to buy the rights and produce a Hollywood version of the Culture. Mostly because it is very easy to flip through the Wikipedia entries and then take the superficial aesthetic of the Culture and misunderstand or ignore the rest.

For an example on how easy it is to do this: I remember vividly when the German translations of the later books came out, and they all had some variation of

The Culture is the galaxy-spanning empire of mankind. Unbeknownst to its citizens however, their supposedly benevolent machine gods are about to dispense with the needs for humans at all"

in the blurb. Someone scanned the wiki page until they read something about “superhuman AI” or the like, then went “ah, got it, I’ve seen Terminator”.

In a similar vein, I cannot imagine that Hollywood would portray the Culture as an unquestionably good Utopia. They’d not be able to resist to paint the luxury gay space communists as “…with a dark secret / actually dystopian /…” tones.

It has to have the same energy though. Dong have to be the same characters, doesn’t have to feature Brakebills for Fillory, but needs the same “we’re broken and magic doesn’t make it better, but hey, here’s a canonical musical” feeling

Pimsleur. It’s very different than Duolingo, in that it is almost entirely audio-based. However, at least in my experience, it actually gets you to the point of speaking and understanding a language much more rapidly than Duolingo. Way, way less gamified though. It expects you to put in half an hour a day where you just concentrate on the lesson.

YES, WATCH STEINS;GATE!

Not Steins;Gate Zero though, that’s a sequel.

The most common criticism is that the first handful of episodes are slow, but I hard disagree. Every moment is either re-contextualized later on, or is important character work.

To clone their voice, and to send the audio to some unknown server

Never in my life hage I known people (in Germany, but probably everywhere) to he happy with politics. I would also argue that for the vast majority (again, here in Germany) life has improved over the past decades.

IMO the reason for right wing surges aren’t actual real-world problems or failings of ruling parties (though flawed they are), but the new forms of propaganda and outreach that right wing parties have mastered, and left wing parties have failed at.

Uhhhhhh

No? If they are hard, they are dried out. Chewy, sure, that’s the fun; but they should be soft to the touch.

Just in case this post is real: the world does NOT hate you. Not you, not your people, not your country.

We wish you could achieve the freedom to experience the entire world.

Hm? I have never been a mod of anything :)

Oh yeah rust tooling is insanely good ootb

I mean… “To fear”? No. But There are plenty legitimate to remove comments and posts that have nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, to do with mod overreach or censorship.

• removing derailing threads from heated discussions
• removing the annoying “just asking questions” people from LGBTQ+ safe spaces
• removing posts accidentally posted into the wrong community
• removing troll posts
• banning repeat troublemakers not willing to follow the rules
• removing aggressive, sexist, racist,… posts

On the other hand, anti-moderation people only ever seem to come up with “but I want to be able to post whatever I want!”

“Free speech” in this context means: you can go create your own instance or community, with blackjack and hookers! And mods can use the tools at their disposal to enable the rest of us to not have to deal with bullshit.

“We don’t need moderators!” shouts the Troll*, in the wrong community.

* either a troll or just an idiot, doesn’t matter imo

I host about 30 services, so it has crossed my mind. But I like the instance I am on now. Also, since it would almost definitely be just me on there, it would be a colossal waste of time, effort, and resources.

I’m too lazy to insert the “look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power” meme here, so… Please imagine it instead.

I’m switching jobs in a couple of months, and I am SO glad to be leaving a (very well maintained!!) python codebase with type hints and mypy for a rust codebase.

It is just not the same.

Fair… Sorry, I always forget how prominent Apple devices are in the US.

Thunderbird for mobile is great! And in contrast to the gmail app, search actually works, lol

They blamed it on the communist party, yes. There were 8 parties represented in the Reichstag at the time though.

If you feel like everybody else is crazy… I got news for you Buddy!

Oh, agreed - I was just trying to engage with the hypothetical that “cool” was plastering all over this thread.