1. This still broadly prevents any slogan from reaching critical mass
2. Eventually, most people are going to be afraid to even try. Self-censorship is actually worse than actual censorship, because it’s insidious and invisible.

• Eventually Company decides “agile will fix things”
• Developers are told to work agile but the only stakeholder they talk to is the PO, who talks to PM, who talks to Sales, who talks to Customers
• PM&Sales don’t want to deliver an unfinished/unpolished product so they give a review every sprint, by themselves, based on what they think the customer wants (they are Very Clever)
• A year or two later the project is delivered and the customer is predictably unhappy.
• Management says “how could this have happened!” and does it all over again.

And defaulting to mixed-use zoning in residential neighborhoods to lower the demand for such parking lots in front of corner stores? Right anakin? And surely you’ll be outlawing concrete slab driveways in favor of semipermeable parking surfaces? Right Anakin??

Narrator: “flood protection” was in fact yet another transparent excuse to keep building the most soulless and uniform shit imaginable in the name of racism and classism.

Broadly correct. Franquin was a grassroots leftist by his peak in the '70s and even now a lot of his comics would generate a lot of “Gaston goes woke???” youtube thumbnails. His comics included a lot of overt anticapitalist & ecologist messaging in particular.

Idées Noires (apparently reedited as “Die Laughing” in English) has his most politically charged stuff and is what happened when Franquin didn’t try to draw for mass appeal:

I did however find some racist colonial stuff from his very early works (1950). I won’t like, it’s quite bad. However the 1950 stuff is ignorant & insensitive racist colonial fuckery from a then 26 year old author who later denounced it and tried to make up for it, while the 2023 stuff is very intentional dogwhistling to modern day racists from boomers who should really know better. It’s unfathomable that Dupuis would have greenlighted such backwards stuff in the modern age.

There is, though I can’t tell you how fun it is because I haven’t played it and never cared for the original games’ battle system.

Not a very hot take, only corpo bootlickers pretend that Nintendo isn’t squandering the franchise.

It’s supremely frustrating that franchises like these get enshittified to hell and there’s fuck-all anyone can do about it if they are not willing to work completely for free (i.e. fanfiction writers). Same with the Star Wars content mill which also went to shit while we’re forced to sit and watch or give up on the franchise entirely. Or LoTR which in the past 20 years only gave us The Hobbit (🤮) and the Amazon show (🤮🤮).
Human stories were meant to be evolved and expanded on; that’s how all of our ancestors built a rich tapestry of myths and folklore over generations, constantly retelling and updating stories. But we aren’t allowed to.

I’m Belgian. My grandparents, my parents, my cousins and my cousin’s children all grew up reading Belgian comics such as Tintin, Spirou&Fantasio, Lucky Luke, the Smurfs, etc, which were written in the mid-20th century. Yet if any of them publishes anything set in those universes they’ll get sued into the ground, so instead these important cultural works are left to rot and wither and be slowly forgotten by each subsequent generation while the Estate shits out a soulless (if not outright racist and sexist which shits on everything that Franquin ever stood for) reboot that no-one cares about every 15 years or so. Such a sad end for such important cultural landmarks that used to be the pride of our country.

Copyright should last 25 years, just like patents. That’s more than enough time to recoup your initial investment and doesn’t prevent you from making money after then, you’ll just have to compete for it on the marketplace of ideas. Isn’t that what capitalists should want?

Cobblemon is a pokémon mod for minecraft, and definitely has a charm to it and fits weirdly well into the minecraft-pixel-art-with-shaders esthetic IMO. Plus the “gotta catch em all” basic gameplay loop meshes well with Minecraft’s incentive to explore the world.

Of course it’s a free mod so it’s a bit rough around the edges and there doesn’t seem to be much to do beyond collect pokémon and build minecraft houses, but in my online circles it certainly has captured a lot more attention than any pokémon game released in the last forever. I would like to think Nintendo is taking notes, but we all know they Don’t Give A Fuck. They’ll pump out any asset flip and people will buy it because they’re nostalgic and Nintendo has a legally enforced monopoly on the franchise.

You’re thinking about it in-universe. But Batman wasn’t revealed to the world through an act of God. His nature, his limitations, his friends and enemies, his entire city were all constructed to enable the fundamental narrative of a billionaire in a suit indulging in violent vigilante power fantasies.

Of course you’re right that within that particular framework “giving away all his money” doesn’t make narrative sense. That’s the frustrating part; not that a character is arguably acting “irrationally” (that happens all the time), but that the stated reasons for their irrationality are convoluted and clearly backtracked from “well without it the story doesn’t work”.

The end result is that Batman is basically John Wick but depicted as a hero which I’ve always personally found very gross. This criticism is applicable to most superheroes but the dissonance is especially strong with Batman.

I have a hard time imagining anyone sticking to this same argument if the satire were directed towards someone they admired in a similar position of power

I have a hard time imagining a reasonable person being mad at satire of a politician. Like maybe it’s a cultural divide and I’m not American so I don’t view politics as team sports and my country has a stronger history of political satire than the often pathetically meek American political cartoons, but you can make a satirical deepfake of the politicians I voted in last election if you want.

If the deepfake was not obviously related to current political events or wasn’t obviously fake, the point could be arguable at least as a matter of good taste. As it stands, the satire is obvious, harmless, and topical. It is therefore terrifying that censoring it is even a question. How far the concept of free speech has fallen that it refers to Seig Heiling but a 2s gif of Trump sucking some toes apparently crosses a line.

Is this considered porn? I am certainly, along with at least hundreds of millions of people, into shirtless Ryan Gosling. Specifically his pecs and abs.

Look, I am taking the piss, but not everything that might turn someone on for one reason or another is porn. The AI video of Trump is clearly satire and meant to disgust. What’s next, we can’t make satirical drawings of him grovelling at Putin’s feet because some people have a humiliation fetish?

There’s plenty of legal precedent for newsworthiness to supersede some rules in the name of the freedom of the Press. It makes sense that I’m not allowed (at least where I live) to post a non-consensual pictures of someone off the street. But it would not make sense if I was forbidden from posting a picture of the Prime Minister visiting a school for example. That’s newsworthy and therefore the public interest outweighs his right to privacy.

The AI video of Trump/Musk made a bunch of headlines because it was hacked onto a government building. On top of that it’s satire of public figures and – I can’t believe that needs saying – is clearly not meant to provide sexual gratification.

Corpos and bureaucracies would have you believe nuance doesn’t belong in moderation decisions, but that’s a fallacy and an flimsy shield to hide behind to justify making absolutely terrible braindead decisions at best, and political instrumentation of rules at worst. We should celebrate any time when moderators are given latitude to not stick to dumb rules (as long as this latitude is not being used for evil), and shame any company that censors legitimate satire of the elites based on bullshit rules meant to protect the little people.

An American visiting family across the country would be like if you went to visit relatives in Latvia or something (in terms of distance).

I think you’re overplaying the distance part a little bit. America was “discovered” in the Age of Exploration right on time for distance to be an increasingly less important factor. Hence why America could sustain a federal state made up of an almost entire homogeneously WASP population, and Europe could not (and the idea of a “federal Europe” is still a pipe dream at this point). There’s more of a cultural divide by every metric between two cities 100 km away on either side of a linguistic border in Europe than there is between Boston and Los Angeles.

while a Boston accent to a Southern drawl is more like Quebecois French to European French

You’re over-exagerating. Heavily accented Texans have little to no trouble being understood by a Bostonner, but a heavily accented older Québécois is nigh impossible to understand for the unattuned French ear. It’s like the Hot Fuzz “sea mine” scene.

I appreciate that the US obviously doesn’t have a fully homogeneous culture (especially in cities with immigrant backgrounds), but it’s nothing Europe where Brits can tell which village someone comes from just from their accent. If I were to drive to Riga (which is actually barely as long of a drive as Boston to New Orleans) I would have to go through five sovereign states, each with their own language and variety of minority languages, their own idiosyncratic laws and justice systems (to the point that unlike the US the EU never make laws, it makes directives for EU states to implement individually), a completely different set of TV shows and radio shows and literature canon and more local food specialties than would be possible to keep track of. I’m sorry but going from Boston to New Orleans is nowhere near as much of a cultural shock. The only thing comparable to going from Belgium to Latvia is going from the US to Latvia.

Anyway it’s not a competition. Taking pride in our ancestors’ achievements is a dangerous road to go down, and anyway if we look at modern achievements then the entire developed world has unfortunately coalesced towards a very globalized (often american-centric) set of values and esthetic sensibilities. You can take a random new condo built in Phoenix, Amsterdam, Shanghai, and Bratislava and not be able to tell which is from where, and the people living in them are probably all watching an American TV show anyway.

I’m as basic-white-belgian as they come and even I have a little bit of Italian and Eastern European (IIRC) somewhere in there. “Pure” (ew) lineages are actually quite rare in Europe, only the most remote places were spared the millennia of warfare (and the grim reality that soldiers, uh, move genes around) and the urban flights of the industrial revolutions. The average European’s background isn’t as diverse as the average American’s, but a lot more than one might naively assume.

What is striking about North America though is the anglo-saxon cultural homogeneity, especially considering the diverse backgrounds. Besides Quebec there’s virtually no language barrier anywhere, and an almost entirely homogenous culture. You could probably raise a kid in 6 states and 3 provinces without any major issue. All North Americans eat Mac and Cheese and they all watch the Superbowl and all American children stand up for the Pledge. Meanwhile the only cultural references I am likely to have in common with the average Pole is American TV/movies/music and depending on their English skill having a conversation at all may be a major challenge.

There’s not a bunch of full frontal nudity or raunchy sex scenes, that’s true.

But the game is shamelessly horny. All characters were designed to be maximally fuckable and they’re all desperately tryna fuck. The sexual tension is palpable and several of the MC outfits wouldn’t be out of place at a sex party.

Don’t get me wrong I wouldn’t call the game softcore porn by any stretch, it’s just… canonically horny. Which is perfectly fine.

MAGA against who exactly? There don’t seem to be many high ranking Democrats willing to call out Trump on his bullshit, and none willing or capable of leading an actual separatist movement or insurrection. They’re actually even more subdued and helpless than they were in 2017.

I’d love to be wrong but I’m calling it now; when (blue) “states’ rights” get de facto dissolved and/or their midterm elections are obviously rigged, they will buckle silently and proceed with a Peaceful Transition Of Power™. Maybe their attorneys will send a Strongly Worded Letter to the Trump-appointed federal judges in charge of their case, but that’s about all the political violence the American Left has an appetite for.

States being stripped of their independence is exactly what happened to Germany in the '30s and I don’t see why the U.S. would suddenly deviate from the script. Your country is way too morally bankrupt to even entertain the idea of a popular uprising.

I’ve always despised teen drama in media. Back when I was a teen, and now. Can’t stand it. For that reason, I have zero interest in playing the sequels. Furthermore, some of Life is Strange’s writing is downright amateurish.

But somehow, the game threads the needle of the formula in a way I can’t explain (and from what I read the developers weren’t ever able to fully replicate it either). The gameplay, the themes, the great acting/directing, the amazing soundtrack, the perfectly paced escalation of the stakes… It all works together to attach the player very deeply to the characters. I played it a decade ago and the ending absolutely shook me to my emotional core. To this day one of my favorite works of fiction.

Last time around Asahi Lina (major contributor to the Apple Silicon GPU driver) made a very nice writeup on mastodon about her attempts to mainline her work.

Part of the problem was that the C interface was straight-up broken; not only were a bunch of lifetimes undocumented, but freeing the kernel objects properly was impossible, but GCC doesn’t care and neither did anyone because GPU drivers are expected to just… never exit (IIRC). So she refactored it to be saner.

Anyway apparently it was rejected for much the same reasons, aka Rust bashing thinly disguised as concerns over maintainability.

Technically the R4L project did have an impact. But what’s the worst case? Spending some time on improving the C interface for an edge case? The ignominy! NAK.

The EU stopped using increasing amounts of power around 2010 despite continued economic growth (yes, even if you account for imported goods).

Not that consumerism and the exploitation of the global south aren’t existential tragedies for our species, I’m just pointing out that while capitalism does require never-ending growth, it is interesting to note that it empirically doesn’t require ever-increasing power to do so.

Fascism is a byproduct of capitalism but unrelated to energy prices. Doesn’t matter if gas is 1€/L or 2€/L when Musk, Murdoch, or Bernard Arnault decide what gets voted, printed and shown on TV.

Also English is an odd germanic-romance bastard child that Western Europeans tend to like because it has a decent number of cognates for everyone and a simple grammar IF you’re only aiming for simple conversational English. The barrier to entry is quite low, especially if you don’t give a shit about having a thick accent and straight up mispronouncing tricky words (as anyone knows who had a conversation in English with a non-fluent Italian/Spanish/French person).

OTOH German used to be relatively widely spoken in Eastern Europe, and Slavic languages also use declensions AFAIK, and also even post WWII German held quite a bit of momentum in academic circles.
So if the Soviet block had gone the Chinese route and become an economic behemoth instead of withering and dying at the dawn of the Information Age, German being the lingua franca (or at least giving English a run for its money) would have been a distinct possibility IMO.

This can be - and has been - generalized to all industrualization.

Tolkien wrote Isengard the way he did for a reason.

The history of Brutalist architecture is closely associated with fascism as it promotes societal ideals of a neatly segmented and ordered life.

Henry Ford. Just, Henry Ford.

Elon’s technocratic nazi grandfather.

I would also like to remind everyone that fascism is simultaneously extremely dangerous but doomed to fail. That obsession for finding rigid rules where there aren’t any, of constraining the real world to simplified models, makes fascists eventually lose touch with reality because they can’t account for the messiness and human factor. At first they destroy everything they touch, kill anyone that doesn’t fit the model. They then make fatal, obviously irrational mistakes like opening an Eastern front in Europe before tidying up the Western one because the Ideology says Bolsheviks are weak. Attacking the US in Hawaii. Not installing Lidar in supposedly self-driving cars. Invading Ukraine with an incompetent army and cardboard supplies against a dug-in western-supplied army.

It’s not particularly helpful to the tens of millions killed by fascism yet, but at least we can rest assured that the fascist technosolutionists will lose and that plants will grow out of their corpse.