Plenty of words have multiple meanings, but I rarely think of them when I’m using a word to mean a specific thing. I know the meanings of gimp, but I never think of them when using GIMP; perhaps because it’s capitalized and I always assumed it stood for something (and it does).
But anyway, and more importantly than that, what you describe is a problem that you might run into with any word.
A small subset of the world population can view it as an insult, but for the vast majority it means nothing. Sort of like the word “negro” in Spanish, which some English people take offense to when they hear it. I even searched “gimp” in 3 different search engines, and the first 2 to 5 results were always the GIMP. Most people have no other concept for the word.
Let me put it this way: you say you’d favor Kira, but how do you know that there aren’t some kids in Egypt, or Russia, or someone else in the world, that take offense to the word “Kira”?
Most of what people call DS’s lore is made up of complete guess work from the fans, and pretty much everyone you ask will have a different idea of the lore. Even the YouTube DS lore masters will contradict each other on a lot of things, or have a different version of the events.
It’s perfectly fine for people to enjoy that, but it’s definitely not as deep as people make it seem.
As for ES, the lore is actually quite deep and has been developed for a lot longer than DS lore. As a couple of examples, you have Pelinal Whitestrake and the Dwemer, the latter of which is also the subject of a lot of speculation and fan theories. Just between those two, and not counting fan theory and speculation, you probably have more lore than in all of Dark Souls.
Not the person you replied to, but in my opinion was Oblivion was pretty good, but not as good as Morrowind. Compared to MW a lot of things felt dumbed down (i.e. beast races can wear shoes, no armour/clothes layers, no spear, etc.), and although I don’t think there’s much they could do to make the environment more interesting, since the setting is what it’s meant to be, the dungeons felt incredibly boring and repetitive.
However, I did quite like the story - especially how you are not a chosen one, which is rare for such games - and I thought a lot of the quests were pretty interesting, arguably at MW’s level or better (there are definitely some exceptions*). The Dark Brotherhood quest line especially, which is not present in MW, and is much better than Skyrim’s DB quest line.
*I will also add something that I hated: despite not being a chosen one story, it allowed you to be the head of all guilds, resulting in a quest where you may have to steal something from yourself.
You ignored most of what I said, cherry-picked things, and even then had to leave out context and use vague language to make your argument seem anything less than insane.
The rise of the Nazis before WW2 was definitely partly caused by the imposition of the allies after WW1.
You mean economic sanctions? Around the same time that Germany was suffering from those economic sanctions and Hitler was rising to power, the world was going through The Great Depression, and by the time Hitler rose to power Germany’s economy was already improving. And even you are aware enough to use the word “partially” in that sentence. More on this towards the end (*).
They write the history books after all.
That’s an argument made by people who don’t know history and have nothing to back their claims. I really would not be shocked if you tried to claim the Holocaust wasn’t real, next.
They still killed about 8% of the total German population during WW2.
I’m not gonna bother to check that number because 8% of the population of a country being killed during a war is not a genocide, and not even an inherent attempt at one. What the Nazis did to the Jews, and what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, that is genocide. Push them away from where they live, close them off in ghetto’s or walled compounds, and slowly kill them off. That’s how the Holocaust started too, before they moved to concentration camps and gas chambers.
Almost 50% of German casualties during WW2 were civilians…
Firstly: According to this, about 2.25M civilians were killed during expulsions, and 500K Germans were killed by strategic bombing, but it does not specify how many are civilian. Even if we assume 100% of those are civilian and say the number of civilians casualties is 2.75M, that still only makes up 39% of the German death toll. That “almost” is certainly doing a lot of work there, for someone complaining about reality.
Secondly: How many civilians do you think make up the Palestinian death toll when they indiscriminately (and sometimes purposefully) bomb civilian areas? Israel has purposefully bombed civilian targets; 4 in 10 killed in Gaza are children; just in 2023 22K Palestinians were killed.
Finally: That still doesn’t cover the important part you ignored, which is that no one is defending the bombing of German civilians during WW2, (*) and most people acknowledge the sanctions on Germany after WW1 were too harsh. Meanwhile, you are actively defending the ongoing killing of innocent civilians, and the genocide that has been ongoing for decades. Even if (and this is a giant fucking if) you were right in your comparison, you are merely arguing against yourself, because most people are not okay with any of those things.
You are somehow both (1): trying to equate Nazi Germany to Palestine, when Israel is the one doing to Palestinians what Nazi Germany was doing to the Jews, and (2): at the same time, purposefully or not, trying to victimize and justify the fucking Nazis.
I’m pretty sure we’re not far from this conversation straying into Holocaust denial, either by you or someone else coming in here, so I’m leaving this convo permanently. I hope neither you nor your loved one ever get bombed because of people living in your general area; peace.
Firstly, the first and only rule of the instance you are commenting on is “be nice”, but you couldn’t even do that for one comment. Why are you even here? It’s like going to a place whose sole purpose is having somewhere where there isn’t rubbish on the floor, and throwing something on the ground as soon as you set foot in the area.
Secondly,
This situation and WW2 are not remotely the same thing. And no historian would call what the allies did to the Germans “genocide”, because it wasn’t. What Israel is doing has been. And it will be remembered as such. Just some differences:
They don’t hold even remotely the same kind of power and influence over the people in their region. The Nazis were given power through legal elections, Hamas was not. And Hamas is only in control in Gaza, not in the West Bank, where Palestinians still suffer at the hands of Israel.
The existence of Hamas is a direct consequence of what Israel has been doing for several decades; this conflict did not just start last year. There was not an ongoing genocide of Germans before WW2, and it’s not how the Nazis came about.
WW2 was a war being fought between mainly armed soldiers, and people do not defend or support the bombing and killing of civilian targets, nor were they the primary targets. Israel has bombed and killed Palestinians indiscriminately, and that is what you are defending.
The podcasts and other media consumption will probably be what most benefit you in the long term, and something like Anki and Duolingo I think are good complements for that.
Any alternatives to Duolingo that I think would be worth replacing it, would have to be something that is more focused on the specific language that you are learning, i.e. Nicos Weg for German (and I don’t personally know any for Italian, sorry). Most other general language learning websites/apps would probably be running into the same issues and limitations as Duo, and which one to use depends most on personal preference; however, there is one I’ve heard of called Italki (there may be more) which basically acts as a language exchange app, where you connect talk to people who natively speak the language you are learning, and they can give you input. I’ve never tried it, but I’ve heard good things.
Other than that, you have certified online/in person courses, but obviously those are not as convenient as Duo, and they cost money (probably significantly more than even a Duo subscription).
EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention, but one thing which I personally enjoy is looking up and trying to read children’s books; and I mean like “90% picture & 10% text” books which are made for parents to read to their very young kids. And as you get more comfortable, try finding and reading increasingly harder books/stories online.
This is frustrating, but it has always been an issue; and usually the more you advance in a language tree the more it happens, because fewer people have found the problem and reported it. It’s a human problem that comes with not considering every possibility when creating an exercise. I’d imagine that using AI (in addition to humans) would actually help reduce cases like this, since they could be detected before users run into them.
That’s a bit over the top, in my opinion. I’ve tried plenty of courses, and Duolingo is pretty good to get a hang of the basics of a language.
I’d say, in my experience, the hardest part of learning a language is getting started, and I feel Duolingo is perfect just for that. To get deeper knowledge and become more comfortable, one should probably switch once they start feeling more comfortable with the alphabet (if there is a specific one), and with the basic vocabulary and grammar.
EDIT: Forgot to add but another advantage of Duolingo, is that it’s also great to get a taste and basic feel for different languages; and that can be especially useful for someone who is looking to learn a new language but can’t quite decide on one.
Any tolerance for those ideologies
Again, you are misrepresenting what is being said. There is no tolerance being given to those ideologies, neither by me nor by the other user. You are arguing in bad faith and misrepresenting what is being said; the very thing you accused the other person of. There is really no point in continuing to talk if you’re going to do that, so I’ll just leave a link to another comment I wrote that expands on this, and I’ll be going.
I think you have misunderstood what the other user was saying, and/or are not thinking through what you are saying.
You said “All areas should be nazi-free areas”, but unless you are advocating for putting them up against a wall, that is not possible to do. That is what the other user meant by “‘Tow it outside the environment’ is not an option”. By the way, I think that expression is a reference to this; it’s not very relevant to this topic, but might help illustrate the point they were making.
Another alternative, like the other user mentioned, would be “lifelong reeducation camps”; but not only does that have questionable morality behind it, it’s also not a view that merges very will with the idea of abolishing the police and especially prison systems, which so many on the left, especially the more libertarian left (which btw a lot of Beehaw seems to lean towards, including me, and I think the other user as well), subscribe to.
Like the saying goes: “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity/ignorance”, or something like that; there are real life examples of former Nazis/white supremacists changing their views just from interacting with other people outside that group. When you think of a Nazi, you’re probably thinking about the smart and actually evil ones that tend to be at the top, but a large part (I think the vast majority) are just the product of fear and ignorance (think average German during WW2); and when you try to erase/separate those people from society, one way or another, you’re often just feeding into that ignorance and fear.
Over the past several days I’ve seen you draw out many good faith disagreements about racism or nazism into what seem like intentionally blurry “just asking questions” type derailments whereby you try to shift the topic of the discussion to other, emotional or tangential details and or try to misrepresent the issue at hand to make the racism or nazism seem not that bad.
This does not appear to me at all what is happening, at least in this thread, and I would even go as far as to call it gaslighting.
The other user literally said if 10 people are at a table and 1 is a Nazi, then all 10 are Nazis. They have also labelled any opposing view as “sympathizing towards Nazis” in another comment. That is pretty damn fucking far from good faith. And yet, somehow, because this other user pointed out the problem with this type of thinking, you are now accusing them of not being good faith? Are you serious? People are refusing to have any kind of nuanced view of the situation, accusing everyone in that situation of being a Nazi and people who disagree of being sympathizers, but somehow the other person is the one not acting in good faith, or using emotional arguments?
I really don’t want to be rude, but your comment reads like textbook projection. They also never said anything to defend Nazis or the far right, not once (*), so that makes you the one who is misrepresenting what they are saying and doing. I encourage you to keep everything you said in mind, but re-read the thread through a more objective lens.
I really didn’t want to get involved in this conversation, but some of these comments really frustrated me, and yours was just the straw that broke the camel’s back; I had to let some of the frustration out. If you just want to ignore me, that’s fine.
(*) At least as far as this discussion is concerned; I do not have an all seeing eye.
All those are fine suggestions, but a “free with ads” option isn’t that bad either; the real problem isn’t the ads themselves. The real problem is how intrusive the ads are, how many of them there are, as well as much information they (and YouTube) collect on you. Plus, in this case, the company in question isn’t exactly a small company who is financially struggling. It’s the classic capitalist problem of “infinite growth”, where your profits have to be constantly increasing.
But there’s nothing inherently wrong about the idea of having ads, just like there’s nothing inherently wrong about youtubers having sponsors.
Firstly, the one rule of the instance of the community you are commenting on is “be nice”, so maybe relax on the hostilities. That user acted perfectly respectfully, and you came in calling them immature and unprofessional. Afterwards, I replied to in what I think was also a polite manner, and now you’re accusing me of having no values. So if you wanna talk about no values and immaturity, feel free to look in a mirror and talk to that person. This will be my last reply to you.
Secondly, you’re asking for someone who mods a community to be excluded from it. Why would anyone want to mod a community they like, if it means being excluded from it, or why would you want the mods to be people who don’t like a community?
Why would any of you think it’s okay for mods to power-trip?
I never said anything close to even implying that, and you know that. You are simply arguing in bad faith and being a nuisance. You’ve created far more problems than they ever did, and it seems you’re the one trying to exert some kind of power over the community of an instance you are not even a part of by implying that someone, who did not act reprehensibly in any way, should step down from a mod position, just because you’ve decided they should not share their opinions.
So, to reiterate: there was a misunderstanding that was quickly cleared up. There was no abuse of power. You came in and insulted someone, then insulted me, and created a huge drama over a non-issue. And now I’m done with this conversation. Have a good day.
How do I get a computer?
Well, firstly: people would still make them the way they do now. Some would organize and collect materials, and some would refine and make them into parts that eventually make it into computers. The whole chain would still exist, except now it would be done voluntarily. That’s it. Organized labour does not stop existing once you get rid of money. I’m sure you’ve heard of open source software projects.
Which leads into the second part of my comment: it seems to me that your real fear is that there wouldn’t be volunteers for one or several parts of the chain… at which point I have to ask you to take a step back and think about it is that you want, and what you are defending. If there are no volunteers to do a job in such a society, and the only way to get people to do it is threatening them with poverty and starvation, then it is not a job worth doing if you value human rights and dignity.
You probably didn’t catch because I edited late, but I gave some recommended reading at the end of my previous comment. To those, I’ll add David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything and Bullshit Jobs.
Uncontacted tribes are not the only ones that have used such systems; plenty of other societies throughout time have used similar systems, some quite recently even. It is not antithetical to modernity. For a recent example of a society that used a gift economy, you can look up “Korean People’s Association in Manchuria”. I was using uncontacted tribes merely as one example to illustrate that the idea that bartering and capitalism are “natural” and “how it always worked” isn’t true, despite that being what many believe.
It’s ultimately more efficient to give people money and then they can spend it on what they need or want.
Why is it more efficient, exactly? In a gift economy, you don’t have to give anyone money for anything and won’t starve for not having enough money. In a gift economy, you help each other where possible and do things such as art or science for fulfilment and not because you have to put food on the table. Someone who can help, but rarely does, slowly begins to get shunned by the rest of society.
EDIT:
To read more on gift economies and anarchism in general, you can read:
Petyr Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread is a good one; that’s more theory
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; a sort of memoir of Orwell’s time in Catalonia fighting alongside anarchists
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed; a sci-fi story about a futuristic anarchist society living on a planet that mutually orbits another planet that is inhabited by other societies.
Bye bye studio and any future art because we all are trapped in this capitalist nightmare. Do their families not deserve to be supported for their work?
I think it’s safe to assume they are not fans of capitalism; I doubt they want to keep living in a capitalist system where artists and developers are not paid. They are talking about artists and developers because that’s what the topic is about, but I would assume this thought stretches to all of society.
What they were describing was basically a society that relies on a gift economy, which has already existed in the past, and still exists in some places and forms today. We’ve been brainwashed by capitalist societies to think that would be a “hippy-dippy, fantasy land” because capitalism and bartering are what is natural to us, but it’s been shown that a gift-based economy is what a lot of uncontacted tribes use. It’s also how a lot of friend groups interoperate - hell, start a minecraft server (some other survival game will do) with your friends right now, and you will almost certainly naturally default to using a gift based economy.
It’s immature, and unprofessional.
This isn’t a job. They are a user like you who happen to also volunteer to mod because someone has to. They have just as much right to share their opinion as you do, and they did it politely. Besides, they didn’t even start an argument, they just shared an opinion, confirmed it, and then clarified again; all of it in a polite manner.
Anybody could goad a mod like that to misusing their authority
They seem to have handled the situation just fine and even left the report for other mods to handle. I really don’t see what the big issue is.
EDIT: Never mind, I thought that was a sarcastic comment mocking the other user.
And what’s wrong with that, exactly? Would you prefer broken games made by under paid and overworked people?
As for “worse graphics”, AC: Unity came out in 2014, The Witcher 3 came out in 2015, and the Arkham Knight is also from 2015. All of those have technically worse graphics, but they don’t look much different from modern games that need much beefier systems to run.
And here’s AC: Unity compared to a much more modern game.
I don’t know about the 2 versions, but the 3070 bit is part of what I mean.
Price has been an issue with all hardware recently - even in regard to other things due to inflation in the last few years - but it’s not exclusive to the 4060. But more importantly, from what I can tell, the 3070 has a 1.2x to 1.4x increase in performance in games, but it consumes about 1.75x the power (rough numbers, i’m kind busy rn). Because I don’t have much time right now I can’t look at prices, but when you consider the massive difference in consumption, the price different might start making more sense and only seem ridiculous if you just focus on power.
I already wrote another comment on this, but to sum up my thoughts in a top comment:
Most (major) games nowadays don’t look worlds better than the Witcher 3 (2015), but they still play the same as games from 2015 (or older), while requiring much better hardware with high levels of energy consumption. And I think it doesn’t help that something like an RTX 4060 card (power consumption of a 1660 with performance slightly above a 3060) gets trashed for not providing a large increase in performance.
This describes my thoughts pretty well - in short, the chase for better graphics tends to hamstring innovation and other creative ideas; we end up playing mostly the same games but with better graphics. But I wanted to add something else, so I figured I’d use your comment as a jump-starting point.
The never ending race for better graphics that end up giving us diminishing returns, also ends up setting in us on a race of pure computing power where I feel like efficiency comes second - or not at all. It doesn’t help that poor optimization is also so common in a lot of games.
I don’t want to shill for Nvidia, but the response to the launch of the 4XXX generation was a pretty good example of that, and how a big part of the issue is also consumers. The 4060 card has great power consumption, to the point of being on par with the 1660, while performing about 2x better than it, and 1.5x better than a 2060. And to put it another way, it’s sightly better than the 3060 while using between only 60% and 70% of its power. Yet, the card was widely trashed, by both reviewers and consumers, most of which (both former and latter) never mention the efficiency of the card. A quick look up of performance videos on YouTube, will show you how people will usually just show FPS, VRAM usage, and maybe memory usage too; quite a few will only show you FPS; a surprising amount will show you pretty much anything you can think of except GPU power usage.
This is especially worrying and disheartening, when I think about how we seem to be on the verge of an energy crisis.
Most (major) games nowadays don’t look worlds better than the Witcher 3 (2015), but they still play the same as games from 2015, while requiring much better hardware with high levels of energy consumption.
There have been examples of anarchy working. Unfortunately, most of the ones I know of were around during World War 2 and got crushed between 2 larger opponents, or backstabbed by one of them.
Anarchists - and other socialists in Catalonia - during the Spanish Civil War, were stuck between the fascists and the republicans (Soviets), sided with the Soviets and ended up being betrayed. Homage to Catalonia by Orwell is a good book about the civil war and the anarchists.
Korean People’s Association in Manchuria were destroyed by Japan a few years before WW2 during a war between China and Japan IIRC, and apparently some of its leaders were also killed by “Korean communists” (the same ones that ended up forming North Korea).
The Black Army of Ukraine fought the Red and White armies at separate times; one time they joined the Red Army against the White Army, and were betrayed.
You might have noticed a pattern there, which is also why a lot of anarchists are not found of Marxist-Leninists or Stalinists.
A “Democrat” is a member of the “Democratic Party” of the USA, it is not a political ideology in itself. Democrats are usually economic Liberals and don’t care that much about workers or the environment, but some are Social Democrats (Bernie Sanders). They are also usually socially progressive.
The Republican Party is also composed mainly of economic liberals; however, they are typically socially conservative.
There is such a thing as a “Libertarian Socialist”, which seems to be what you are looking for. A lot of Libertarian Socialists also just call themselves “anarchists”; and “anarchism” essentially just means something like “anti-authority” or “anti-hierarchy”.
If you want to maybe explore it a bit:
Homage to Catalonia is a book written by George Orwell where he tells of his time in Spain fighting alongside the anarchists and socialists in Spain (against the fascists supported by Hitler and Mussolini, and against the republicans backed by Stalin).
The Dispossessed written by Ursula K. Le Guin; it’s a sci-fi story about a society living on a moon, who are anti-capitalists and supposedly anarchists (whether they are anarchists or not is one of the focus points of the story).
If you just want to read theory instead, you can also search for Pyotr Kropotkin, and Emma Goldberg.
Completely understandable. Not that I agree necessarily, but I understand.
My main issue is, would that really change much? At the end of the day, companies show up and survive by meeting people’s needs/wants, and politicians climb to the top and stay there by having people on their side and not doing things those people would disapprove of. This means that if all those powerful people just went poof one day and disappeared, they would be replaced by new companies and new politicians doing all the same things as before, as long as people want and do the same things.
This means the only way things can really change, is if the culture itself changes and people begin to want and do different things. One way or another, whether people believe it or not, people are in power. The question is in whether they organize and use it, or just sit back and give up control and let themselves be taken by the flow.
Off course, there’s a counter-argument to be made about how much influence those powerful people also have on everyone else’s way of thinking, but then that just makes it a closed loop, and someone needs to break it.
No worries, it happens. I’ve also done it a few times, and even re-rewrote comments from scratch after I realized I was being too mean, haha.
I do agree with your point, though. People are a lot more forgiving of CDPR than they would be of other companies doing the same things. CDPR did build up a lot of good will with the Witcher series, GOG and their position on DRM, and other things, but at the end of the day they are still a company, and their main goal is making money.
Just a friendly reminder that Beehaw’s one rule is “Be(e) nice”. You have a lot of comments on this thread, and at least a few are responding to people in condescending and snarky ways instead of engaging in any real discussion. Right now, just as an example, you could have tried to explain how good AI can make a game better.
Let’s please not let this place become like Reddit, where often people can’t have civil discussions and try to dunk on each other with snarky one-liners.
You really haven’t contributed anything to the conversation so far other than repeating several times how disappointed you are, and how disgusted you are at people here. Do you want to perhaps expand on that?
For my view, here is a comment I essentially made addressing comments like yours.
To everyone who is against this, and call the people supporting it “disgusting”:
Here is a post on Beehaw about climate activists who spray-painted a yacht. Posted about 10 days ago but only has 68 upvotes, and 15 comments at this time; meanwhile this post sits at 182 votes and 151 comments just 1 day after. Off course, you could argue it’s because c/environment isn’t as big as c/news; although that could be said to be a demonstration of the problem itself. But the real questions are: why did it not spread further, and why did you almost certainly not hear about it?
Because no one gives a shit about that. It raises no eyebrows. Because it’s meaningless and doesn’t really inconvenience anyone. She probably just had her yacht cleaned, and it never bothered her for more than the 5 seconds she was made aware of the spray paint. It’s not going to stop any other rich people from buying yachts, and it’s not going to raise the awareness of the average person and cause them to reduce their consumption either. In the end, it accomplished absolutely nothing.
Climate activists have been trying peaceful protests for 50 years, do you need a reminder of how bad things are getting?
And before the arguments about how this affects “working class” people, but all of it is really the billionaire’s and companies fault and that governments need to act: What do companies stand to gain from ruining the planet? Money, which the people give to them while offering each other excuses to consume. What could a government do to stop it? Well, they could introduce carbon taxes, stop subsidizing meat, and invest in more bike lanes and public transport; which would all result in higher gas prices, higher prices for anything made of plastic (among other goods), more expensive energy, much more expensive meat, a lot more bike lanes with smaller roads, and more public transport. Are these all things you’re okay with? If yes, then there’s no reason to not get “ahead” (although we’re far behind) of the problem and start organizing; and if no… well, then you might have stumbled into the problem.
Finally, here is a picture from two posts on c/news that I think illustrates the problem quite well.
Do they need to repress anything, or do people just not care? The yacht news was shared on here, I was literally in that thread. After 2 days, it had less than 60 upvotes and about 10 comments.
In one day, this post is already near 200 upvotes and has 148 comments.
But I guess let’s just keep pretending we’re all angles and that the 1% and leading class are acting in complete isolation. Let’s just keep pretending they are the only problem.
People only care when something might affect them directly, and people messing with theirs cars seems a lot closer to a possible reality to them then being affected by climate change. Which is why everyone claims to want for there to be action to stop climate change, but they are incredibly stubborn about having to change anything about their way of life.
I can easily go without using my phone for extended periods of time, and always have been. I’ve never really been “phone addicted”, and never used my phone during class - despite having one for the entirety of my school years.
That still never stopped me from not paying any attention in class. Drawing on a book/desk, talking to the person next to me, looking out the window, or just spending time with my imagination were things I did too often, and I never needed a phone for any of it.
I seriously doubt banning phones would make much of a difference, other than pissing plenty of kids off. You’re essentially being forced to go to a place, every day, where you will be stripped of your personal belongings and are not allowed to be in contact with the outside world.
The article says:
From the link you posted, it seems this would still be a war crime if it’s true, unless I’m misinterpreting the text:
I assume the aid truck they were using would qualify as an “auxiliary vessel”, and they were using it to impersonate “medical transport”.