growsomethinggood ()

I overall enjoyed reading it but you’re absolutely correct that it was very self-indulgent and smug for waaaaay too much of it.

I can recommend Dimension 20’s Misfits and Magic (season 2 just got announced yesterday!) as a much better critique that still brings the joy that people felt with the source material to the table. The cast all says fuck terfs too!

I think they have a little bit of both, which is important! One of the best Brennan quotes was “people think I’m nice, but I just conform to the genre”

The bi-cycle!

Hello! Congrats on your plans for cat adoption! Here’s a few pieces of advice I have from experience:

1. Kittens are a lot of work. They’re really cute! But they are babies and they act like it. You have to teach them a lot of things about the world, and how to interact with people/other animals/things. And often most places will only adopt out kittens in pairs, since they benefit from having a buddy growing up. Since kittens are in high demand, they often have a bigger adoption fee, if that matters to you. Adult cats between 2-10 years are probably ideal for most new cat owners as they are well established adults that won’t need a lot of training for the most part (but definitely know as much of your cat’s history when adopting if you can!).

2. Cat breeds aren’t like dog breeds, by and large. They are mostly common cats of different colors down at the animal shelter, and cat owners will swear up and down that cat colors have personalities (torties are sassy! Orange cats are dumb but sweet!) but it’s largely just the individual cat’s personality. The important things for you are probably going to be fur length (long hair and hairless cats require a lot more maintenance or it’ll effect their health) and how well you get along with the cat individually. The one thing to note is do not adopt a bengal cat as a beginner! They are hybrids with wild cats and act like it! And also I would advise against smooshed nose cats/floppy ear cats/tail-less cats/short legged “dwarf” cats, as they have some pretty bad health issues from those genetic differences.

3. Cats in the shelter are stressed and probably not going to act exactly the same way when you take them home. If they’re very friendly, they could be more standoffish, or vice versa. You just gotta find the one that speaks to you! And be patient allowing them to adjust when you take them home. Give them a landing space with a litter box, water, and maybe a little food in opposite corners, and give them some hours to get used to the sounds and smells of their new place. Depending on how much space you have, it’ll be between a day and a week for a cat to get settled.

4. Get the very basics to start and be ready to get more stuff later. A basic litter box, scoop, and a cheap carrier will do it before you adopt. Use your own dishes for water and food before you go buying anything for the cat, you don’t know right away what needs they’ll have. The shelter should recommend you food, get small quantities (not bulk) until you’ve had your first vet check up in case that changes. My cat is spoiled with a much bigger litter box than our first pick, a water fountain, an automatic feeder, wet food on a plate (most cats like flat surfaces instead of bowls for food), and so many toys he doesn’t like anymore!

5. Have fun! Cats are great. If you learn their body language and respect their autonomy, they’ll love you so much for it.

If you’re particularly clever, you might see something before the event that makes you go, huh, that seems weird, I wonder why that is. And then the event happens and you’re like, ohh, it was the event! It was telling me the whole time!

Sigh, ACLU, is this really that high a priority in the list of rights we need to fight for right now? Really?

Also, am I missing something, or wouldn’t these arguments fall apart under the lens of slander? If you make a sufficiently convincing AI replica that is indistinguishable from reality of someone’s face and/or voice, and use it to say untrue things about them, how is that speech materially different from directly saying “So-and-so said x” when they didn’t? Or worse, making videos of them doing something terrible, or out of character, or even mundane? If that is speech sufficient to be potentially covered by the first amendment, it is slander imo. Even parody has to be somewhat distinct from reality to not be slander/libel, why would this be different?

If you need to use Google, I’d recommend the &udm=14 trick, as demonstrated on the linked site. It goes straight to a “web only” filter for search results. There are some tricks and tips to set that to your default search option in settings, or you can get a browser extension.

Anyone thinking that lemmy is a welcoming space to women should read through that thread first.

Edit: the current state of Lemmy and the fediverse reminds me heavily of early reddit, for better and for worse. You can curate some pretty supportive communities if you are careful picking them out, they remain well moderated, etc. But there are plenty of places where you’ll get scummy content if you wander or if posts attract too much attention.

Not to discourage usage of OSM at all, but you can absolutely download offline maps on mobile with Google Maps, they’ve just hidden it a bit. If you tap your account icon in the upper right, a menu pops up that includes offline maps, and it’ll let you select boundaries to download.

It also normalizes the practice, the more people do it for just that shiny checkmark. Unless you are legit a public figure who could be impersonated, it’s actively detrimental to everyone else’s privacy to get verified.

Bro are you doing these things to actually make women comfortable and safe around you, or are you doing them so that women treat you nicely? The former is feminist, and the latter is disguised chivalry where women still owe you things for treating them like people. Withholding your support of women unless they tell you what a big strong man good ally you are is not a way to a more equal future, and you can apply this to virtually any minority rights movement.

And if you think women being wary of unknown men is a personal critique, I don’t know what to tell you except that it doesn’t reflect well on you. But it seems like there’s a lot of folks here who missed the point hard and are stepping in it, so you’re in company at least.

Add SmartTube for androidTV and you’re set!

I use Blockada 5 and haven’t noticed any heating issues, it might be worth a go! I did have to enable most of the lists to get good coverage (and then a couple custom selected on/off over time) but I mostly don’t think about it after a little setup. The only thing I do have to worry about is swapping which VPN is on when I want a real VPN- but fortunately the VPN I like (Mullvad) has adblock built in too.

Wow, what a fun cool way to call someone a slur without having the cajones to type it out plain.

I would say the answer is typically a-parent haha

Not very helpful but I hope a dumb joke makes you smile!

Maybe I have the low, low standards of “does it run at all and I can stand to look at it” lol, in which it performs pretty well! I definitely wasn’t planning on playing current release AAA games on the deck so anything that runs I’m pleasantly surprised.

My wife played the beta version on the deck last summer, and let me tell you, that version was baaaaad. It’s really improved with the new upscaling!

I can vouch for BG3, it runs surprisingly well (fans going to the max of course). I have graphics on medium with the upscaling AMD FSR 2.2 on and it’s perfectly fine on both the small screen and connected to the TV.

Re: OP’s thoughts, I also have a desktop but usually my spouse is on it :) The SteamDeck also travels a lot nicer of course!

I think you have identified some small truth, but have made an error in narrowing the scope of where the deficiency actually lies to the individual/group. Exceptions can imply deficiency (among other things) but I would argue that said deficiencies often are in how these groups are treated by society and not inherent to the groups or individuals themselves.

I’m going to use calculus as an example, since there are plenty of reasons you’d expect someone to not be able to do calculus. If you’re sufficiently young, maybe you don’t have the complex reasoning skills to understand calculus (deficiency, but not permanent). If you’re an adult without a math education, would your inability to do calculus be considered a deficiency, or just a lack of opportunity which can be fixed through assistance? If you have been told your kind of person would suck at doing calculus but you really want to learn, and are performing worse than your peers who are told they are good at this naturally, is that a deficiency in the individual or the system they live in? If you have to work more than one job to keep your family housed and don’t have time for calculus, if you are targeted for police violence, if you’re discriminated against by even the most well-meaning people with authority over you, you could be the most brilliant mathematician and it wouldn’t matter- society at large is failing you.

When you’re talking about “exception” here, I think what is really happening is people taking measures to level the playing field for people who have experienced discrimination. In a perfect world with no individual or systemic discrimination, current or historical, these sorts of “exceptions” wouldn’t be necessary! But that’s not the world we live in. The first step to making a more equitable society is recognizing where people got shafted historically and what affect that still has on society today. Getting the short end of the historical stick does not imply immutable qualities about a group of people today.

So, no, I don’t think that giving exceptions to people who need them most inherently implies that they are individually or categorically deficit.

I think it’s also a smidge less likely in the sense that the data would have to be accessed/scraped from many different instances, as opposed to the sort of bulk data reddit seems to be selling. So I’d say protection from AI is much the same as lock protection. Someone can almost always pick the lock, but if you deter folks they’ll look for easier targets. If you want to ensure none of your words are used by AI, post nothing.