One of my personal favorites, and technically an example of media universe crossovers though probably not quite what one would think of, is the Japanese manga series Saint Young Men, which is about Jesus and Buddha sharing an apartment in modern-day Tokyo.
3,000 - Oblivion
That’s spread over 40 or so characters, and dating all the way back to 2006.
I sincerely believe that if any aliens are observing us, they’ve concluded that we actually value and reward insanity and loathe and punish sanity.
And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong…
That’s not uncommon in trades - plumbing, construction, auto mechanics and the like.
There are tricks and techniques that one can learn over time to make things easier or more efficient, but they’re often complex enough or require enough skill and experience that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re just going to unnecessarily screw things up trying. So new people are taught the standard, safe, dependable way of doing things, even if that’s not the way the old hands do it.
Edit to add: in a moral context rather than a practical one, I don’t think it ever is appropriate. IMO, the first requirement for any moral stance is that one abide by it oneself, and unless and until one has managed to accomplish that most basic of tasks, one has no standing by which to even meaningfully comment on other people’s behavior.
Tremors. It’s just pretty much flawless.
Yes - I know lots of childless genXers, including myself.
I think we were the first generation to see the bullshit fairly clearly, but we weren’t even close to being in a position to do anything about it.
The earlier generations generally didn’t see it, and the boomers only saw parts of it - they were too easily distracted by their own greed and self-indulgence. Stuck in the shadows as we were, and growing up right in the middle of it - in the world after the Kennedy/King assassinations and Vietnam and Watergate and OPEC and stagflation and Iran/Contra and on and on and on - we couldn’t really miss it. But we’ve never had any real influence (other than our brief but notable time at the vanguard of music, art and fashion), so it mostly just left us sort of cynical and detached. It’s fallen to the later generations to get fired up enough to maybe do something about it.
And yeah - my plan too has long been to mostly keep a low profile, try to share a bit of what hopefully amounts to wisdom, then slip off-stage before the inevitable shit hits the inevitable fan.
Invisibility is the defining characteristic of Generation X.
When Douglas Coupland popularized the term in his novel of the same name, that was an awful lot of the point. Generation X was the generation that just sort of fell through the cracks, lost in the shadow of the baby boomers.
Over the years, we’ve just adapted to it, and really, at this point, it’s sort of nice to be forgotten. We can just sit on the sidelines, munching on popcorn, offering up a bit of snidely cynical commentary and reminiscing about great music, great times and great hair.
I would assume that first and foremost it’s that, as the old saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. And disabled people and their advocates aren’t squeaky enough.
Cynically, I think there’s another explanation…
I think a lot of activism doesn’t actually generate meaningful results. To some significant degree, it just serves as something for people to fight over and politicians to fundraise and campaign on.
To serve those purposes though, it has to be controversial - there has to be a basis on which one party can take a stance in favor and the other a stance opposed. And another handy feature of that sort of activism is that it doesn’t have to actually be enacted, and in fact, it’s better for the politicians if it’s not. That means that the ones who supported it can fundraise and run merely on having supported it and on the need to counter the evil other party who opposed it, while those who opposed it can fundraise and run merely on having opposed it and on the need to counter the evil other party who proposed it. And since no money was spent on any program, that’s that much more money the politicians can funnel to their cronies. It’s basically free publicity with a bit of “Let’s you and them fight” mixed in.
And LGBT might as well have been tailor-made for that exact purpose.
But with something like advocacy for the disabled, there’s no basis on which either party could dare oppose it, so there’s nothing to fight over, and worse yet, if it’s proposed, there’s no excuse for not passing it, which means they’d have to pay for it, and that’s money that they’d rather be funneling to their cronies.
So politicians mostly just ignore it.
Ah… I love this thread full of people smugly congratulating themselves for not being the sort of people who would smugly congratulate themselves for being intelligent.
To the question:
The three broad alternatives available to me are to present a simplified version of a thought, which will potentially fail to do it justice and will likely fail to really communicate it anyway, since understanding it will require background knowledge the listener likely doesn’t possess, to present a full explanation of the thought, which will be long and ultimately dull, or to keep my mouth shut.
I used to do a fair amount of the second, with predictable results - either listeners grew quickly bored, or they were genuinely interested, which would encourage me to continue until they grew bored.
Now I mostly do the third, and would that I had started sooner. It’s far and away the better way to live. As a general rule, people just don’t want to know about, for instance, my proposed method for reconciling the need for some measure of absolutism in moral judgments with the reality that moral judgments are necessarily highly subjective and situational or my assertion that institutionalized, hierarchical authority is fundamentally illegitimate since there is no nominal justification for it that isn’t arbitrary, self-contradictory or self-defeating.
When I want to communicate those sorts of ideas, I write them out in long posts that are likely not read. Day to day, I just smile and exchange pleasantries and otherwise keep to myself.
I can’t even quite visualize how that could happen.
Lemmy isn’t a platform at all. It’s a piece of forum software.
The platforms are the individual instances - lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or lemm.ee or whatever. There’s well over 1,000 of them total. And they range all the way from extreme left to extreme right, and from rigidly constrained to entirely open.
And since it is the case that there are well over 1,000 instances, each of them privately owned and managed by whatever standards the owners prefer, there is no mechanism by which any particular bias can be maintained at anything above the instance level. That necessarily means that any lemmy-wide bias you might see can only be organic.
You might honestly think about that, and what it says about the ideology you’re trying to pretend you’re not defending.
I don’t even understand this headlong rush for an app. And especially being so desperate for an app that you’d use one that embeds ads unless you pay to remove them.
It just seems completely backwards to me.
With Reddit, it made sense - it was awful in a mobile browser, the official app was complete garbage, and either way it was buried in ads So you could (and I did) use a third party app and get a cleaner and more useful interface and no ads.
But Lemmy’s already fine in a browser and it’s ad-free. So what’s the point?
I could maybe see, somewhere down the road when the apps are complete and established, it might be interesting to experiment with some and maybe find one that’s got just the features I like most. But that’s not what I’m seeing. What I’m seeing are people desperately clamoring for an app - any app - it doesn’t matter how primitive and janky it is - they just desperately need to have an app right now, today, this instant. As if lemmy is completely unusable without one.
And it’s just… not that way at all. Sure, it could be better, but it’s fine.
So I just don’t get it.
I use both, but overall I prefer kbin.
I like the UI much better (on mobile - I couldn’t even tell you what either one looks like on desktop). The lemmy mobile UI is too disjointed for my tastes - it’s essentially just a seemingly random assortment of buttons for a seemingly random assortment of functions. I’ve tried a few lemmy apps, but haven’t been impressed, and I can’t be arsed to wade through dozens of betas in the hope that one of them might actually appeal to me. Kbin’s UI is fine the way it is, so that’s that to me.
And I like kbin.social’s “All” better than any of the lemmys I use (.world, .ninja and .one). Kbin.social has a pretty broad range of content, but generally without the botfarm instances, which is just what I want. Lemmy world (when it’s working) has too much botspam for my tastes, and while I love lemmy.ninja just on principle, it has a relatively sparse and limited “All.” Lemmy.one’s “All” is pretty good, but the overall feel of the instance is a bit too weedy for my tastes.
And Ernest is awesome.
Oblivion. It’s been a few years since I sat down and added it all up, but between all of my characters, I had just short of 3000 hours into the game. Nothing else is even close to that.
Damn. This is the first solid whiff of September I’ve gotten on Lemmy.
I don’t concern myself with it.
At the moment, advertising is so rare and low key that I’d have to go out of my way to be bothered by it, and since there’s no reason to go out of my way to be bothered by something, I don’t.
I assume that as time goes on, there will be more advertising on some instances. I might not know sbout it, since I block any and all ads I can by default, but if I do start seeing them, then I’ll just block the instances that run them.
And that’s that.
I browse on All almost exclusively, and if a community or poster is notably toxic or spammy I block them, but if they just don’t interest me, then I just scroll past them.
Honestly, I don’t even understand what the supposed problem is. The world is full of things that don’t interest me. That’s just the way it goes, and really it’s just background noise that I barely even notice.