SnotFlickerman
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Our News Team @ 11 with host Snot Flickerman
- Comment on Did Obama Becoming President Make People Hide Their Racism? 8 hours ago:
This is also when we saw a lot of these “free thinker” talking head fuckos show up, and they start filling gullible viewers heads with lies and a tiny bit of racism sprinkled in.
I know I’ve already responded once, but this line reminded me of that absolute motherfucker Sam Harris.
I am staunchly atheist and at the time it was nice having some outspoken and seemingly thoughtful atheists promoting the idea that you don’t need religion to be a decent person.
However, that quickly became an excuse and cover for racism. People like Richard Dawkins soon showed their ass and how they were just as adamant about their own unhinged beliefs as religious people. (Dawkins lost me when he suggested that children shouldn’t be allowed to read fiction or “fairy stories” so they “know how to separate fact from fiction.” What a fucking yutz.)
What’s even wilder to me is that the pipeline to racism ended up also turning into a pipeline into religion for men through the Manosphere. We literally have seen a drop in atheist men and an increase in atheist women. This is after nearly two decades of “outspoken atheists” who happen to mostly be male!
As an atheist, watching men who started out in an atheism pipeline be brought into the religious pipeline through racism is fucking wild.
- Comment on Did Obama Becoming President Make People Hide Their Racism? 8 hours ago:
- Comment on Did Obama Becoming President Make People Hide Their Racism? 9 hours ago:
This is a great post (ya fuckin nailed it) but you somehow missed Barack HUSSEIN Obama.
The Hussein middle name absolutely made post-9/11 racists lose their fucking shit.
- Comment on Did Obama Becoming President Make People Hide Their Racism? 10 hours ago:
Evidence it sent racists into a tailspin of racism:
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Assertion that he was not actually American citizen, born in Kenya.
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Assertion that Michele Obama is actually trans and their daughters are adopted.
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Tan suit. Don’t have to say much more about this one. Tons of people have worn tan suits without being hassled about it. I wonder why they hassled Obama specifically about it?
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In early July 2010, the North Iowa Tea Party (NITP) posted a billboard showing a photo of Adolf Hitler with the heading “National Socialism”, one of Barack Obama with the heading “Democrat Socialism”, and one of Vladimir Lenin with the heading “Marxist Socialism”, all three marked with the word “change” and the statement “Radical leaders prey on the fearful and naive”.
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Google is doing a pretty damn good job of throwing these ones down the memory hole, but there were a massive number of photoshops of Obama as a monkey.
This was when he was running for President and while he was President. Those are just examples off the top of my head.
I don’t even like Obama. He let war criminals off the hook and then legalized and codified the worst excesses of the War on Terror under Bush.
But it’s clear as hell that his mere existence made conservatives lose their fucking minds and they’ve never come back from it.
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- Comment on As someone who is aging. Late thirties. How can I keep my finger on the pulse of current trends, particularly in music? 1 day ago:
TikTok has already succumbed to the Olds invading.
That’s why I thought it was hilarious that the US government wants to “ban” TikTok after it’s on the decline with the youth. TikTok at this point is mainly millennials hanging out, trying to find what cool stuff the youth are into.
Wherever the cool kids are hanging out, by the time we find out about it, they’re mostly going to have moved on to something else.
- Comment on As someone who is aging. Late thirties. How can I keep my finger on the pulse of current trends, particularly in music? 2 days ago:
Underrated suggestion.
- Comment on As someone who is aging. Late thirties. How can I keep my finger on the pulse of current trends, particularly in music? 2 days ago:
- Comment on As someone who is aging. Late thirties. How can I keep my finger on the pulse of current trends, particularly in music? 2 days ago:
It’s fine, no worries on your thoughts being all over, it’s the internet. Who cares? You got your points across fine.
I don’t think trying to know what the youth are into is creepy at all! I think the real issue comes from the youth being used to adults being shitty and judgy to them. Like I said, it’s great if we’re not shitty and judgy, but we have to be patient with the youth and their expectations of older people because they’re absolutely colored by the fact that most older folks are weirdly judgy. So it’s more that we have our work cut out for us because most older folks could give a flying fuck about being interested in the art of the youth, and the youth know that and feel it viscerally. It takes time for them to feel “safe” and open up. Like you said, how we grew up with Boomers and most of them are just dogshit and judgy people when it came to the youth. We like to think our generation is better… but it’s not, sadly.
Anyway, it’s not impossible to make inroads with the youth, but you have to be okay with them ribbing you and smile and laugh when they joke about how out of touch you are. They’re going to assume we’re just like any other jerk of an Old, so it just takes more effort on our parts to prove we’re not just some judgy jerk.
I am thankful for every old person who has genuine interest in what the youth are doing and what kind of art they are creating. You’re right, it IS a good thing to be interested, and it’s a good thing to pursue, because it helps break down the very generational barriers we dislike so much.
- Comment on As someone who is aging. Late thirties. How can I keep my finger on the pulse of current trends, particularly in music? 2 days ago:
You can only sort of ever keep up.
The main issue preventing you an Old, from finding more about people who are Young, is that the Young don’t exactly love the old filling up their spaces, trying to remain hip.
This is exemplified by the slow death of social networks as they grow in popularity. A new social network pops up, its quickly populated by the Youth. Slowly, as becomes more popular, Olds start creeping in, until there are so many Olds that the Youth want to go somewhere else because they no longer have privacy.
When Mom and Uncle Jim are in the conversation, everything is suddenly less cool.
We are limited because the youth will always want their own private spaces where they can truly be themselves without their weird expectations of the older generations. If you’re older with zero expecations for the youth, congratulations: you’re unusual, so don’t hold it against the youth that they assume you’re just another boring old person who is going to judge them for something. Most adults are out here judging them, so give them a break on assumptions they might make about you.
I used to keep up with music through YouTube channels, but even the ones I used to follow are aging up and soon enough those people I was listening to are Old now too, and they’re doing the same thing as me, trying to keep up with what’s hip and good.
I understand the desire to do so. New music is often so good, and I really get sick of people who act like the music they grew up with is the best in history. It’s not, and it never will be. Music is always growing and making music is more accessible than ever, which means its really exploding and evolving. There’s never been a better time to love music.
However, as Olds, we’re just going to miss a lot of what’s cool with the kids simply because we’re Olds. So much is just going to naturally be hidden from us.
- Comment on Building game worlds with creative lifehacks from the field of writing 5 days ago:
You know what they call bad writers?
Hacks.
So… this tracks.
Seriously, good writing doesn’t happen with “lifehacks,” that’s how you get worthless shit like Max Landis writing Bright.
I recall almost two decades ago I got into it with a woman who was going to school at Digipen, and she told me what Digipen taught students about writing a game.
She said the point was to create the most everyman main character, so you could have the most customers identify with them, and be able to sell more units.
Which I basically said “They’re teaching you the worst writing techniques possible. Literature students would faint at this idea.”
She didn’t care, she claimed this was “good writing.”
No wonder so many games have such dogshit writing if this is how we’re teaching game writers to write for fucks sake. Pick up a god damned book and get thoughtful, people.
- Comment on How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals 1 week ago:
Not sure “liberals” is the right word, because it kind of encompasses all of the left, of which liberals are more center than left.
Anyway…
Because it’s at odds with with our moral compass and our knowledge of how human psychology works. We believe in people’s ability to learn, change, adapt, and become a better person. We see it practiced better in Europe than America, at least very often in respect to the criminal justice system, which the American version is abusive, unhelpful, and, well, conservative. On the other hand, the left thinks that even the conservatives that hate us deserve at least a bare opportunity at education and redemption. (Or at least most of the left anyway, tankies notwithstanding, of course.) We have science that supports compassion and conversion works better than abuse and ostracism. It takes a lot of fucking time and effort. A lot more than many would say they’re worth, and I get that, but it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
We don’t hate them the same way because we’re not in a brainwashed cult like they are. While a lot of them may be too far gone, not all of them are, and as things spin out of control in the conservative world, increasing numbers of them are starting to question what they’re backing. It’s part of why the crowds protesting for Trump have slowly dwindled to pathetic numbers and have gotten increasingly strange and unhinged. Only the true believers are left, and their numbers are already dwindling in terms of those willing to come out and risk it for Trump.
Even when understanding the Paradox of Tolerance, you’d be hard pressed to find large numbers of leftists who think the best solution is the same kind of senseless eradication of the enemy that conservatives want. You’d find a large number of them who increasingly want to be armed and prepared if they are attacked by violent conservatives, but far fewer that want to be the one to fire the first shot in such a war.
- Comment on I'm so annoyed that they're calling the new hobbit game 'A The Lord of the Rings Game' 1 week ago:
Also, the trailer refers to Hobbits as “creatures” instead of “people.”
What’s with a little fantasy dehumanization, eh, eh?
- Comment on How do passkeys work across devices? 1 week ago:
Short answer: they don’t very well yet.
- Comment on Apple's 'incredibly private' Safari is not so private in Europe 1 week ago:
Then I retract my statement and hope you have a good day.
- Comment on Apple's 'incredibly private' Safari is not so private in Europe 1 week ago:
If you’d read the article, you’d have realized it’s specifically because of a bad implementation by Apple of their URI scheme for handling links.
They’re literally suggesting users use Brave over Safari because it isn’t susceptible to cross-site scripting in the same way.
They urge iOS users in Europe to use Brave rather than Safari because Brave’s implementation checks the origin of the website against the URL to prevent cross-site tracking.
- Comment on Major U.S. newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft for copyright infringement 2 weeks ago:
Good, sick as fuck of these chucklefucks committing mass piracy on an absolutely massive scale and then hiding behind “fair use.”
You know what they did to the Pirate Bay when they committed mass piracy but didn’t actually make much money? The music industry literally pushed for laws to change in Sweden so they could send them to jail.
It’s like in the US, as long as you commit the biggest crime, and make the biggest profit, they’ll make up any worthless fucking excuse to justify you raping the public for a quick buck.
- Comment on is Texas really that cold and cruel as depicted in movies of the Coen brothers, the novels of Cormac Mccarthy and the movie Hell or High Water? 2 weeks ago:
I lived in Louisiana for a while, and I met a bunch of people from Texas.
Texas and the south in general, while having a lot of problems, do still have lots of beautiful, thoughtful, and amazing people there who didn’t ask to be born into such a shithole, and they do what they can to make it better.
A lot of them are artists, I’ve known several musicians from Texas who are good people and while they may be centrist they’re “leftist” by Texan standards. They are pot smoking hippies in most Texans eyes.
In Louisiana in particular, there was an unexpected but large group of Linux enthusiasts, even at the university level. I remember Whitebox Linux being a complete re-implementation of Redhat that one of the schools endorsed.
My local coffee shop was run by a Linux enthusiast who programmed his own till. He lived above the shop and ran it for years.
These books and films are about the dregs of the dregs. You only encounter the worst if you go looking for the worst.
- Comment on I like this text. In which Lemmy community can I best share it ? Thanks. 2 weeks ago:
If this text doesn’t get replicated on the internet forever, it’s a failure of a meme.
- Comment on Let's discuss: Mass Effect 2 weeks ago:
Mass Effect Andromeda is mostly hated, but hot damn, it’s disappointing that it was, because it brought back all the best aspects of the original Mass Effect and iterated upon them greatly. Open world planets to explore with a big, fun to drive vehicle.
I would say it’s main failing was the story and the companions, which was generally forgettable, but the world building was quite good and the environments were beautiful.
For all the failures of the facial animations and dead eyes upon release, the actual game itself is really beautiful when it comes to scenic vistas and so on. Part of the trouble is you spend a large mount of the early game stuck inside samey indoor environments with these dead eyed NPCs, so when it came out, the opening of the game gave people a bad view by focusing you on the games worst offenses right out of the gate. That’s a hard hill for a lot of people to climb over, understandably so.
I just think it was incredibly disappointing because it was in many ways a way stronger game (gameplay-wise and environment-wise) than Mass Effect 2/3. It was a huge step up in quality for the franchise, but because of a botched story and facial animations, it nearly killed the franchise entirely.
It was also one of those games that suffered from Gamergate bullshit. Complaints of Sarah Ryder not being attractive enough and complaints too many LGBT characters. I remember when I used to think EA was lying that they thought they won Worst Company from the consumerist because they had anti-LGBT people doing write-in campaigns against them. I believe them now, even though it felt like they were hiding behind that at the time. Because those are bullshit complaints.
Also, is it just me or did Baldur’s Gate 3 prove you could do a modern version of one of these games in the classic isometric overhead view style?
I’d love to see a Mass Effect style game in a modern isometric overhead view turn-based tactical combat type situation, like X-COM but more like an RPG than a tactical combat game with minor RPG elements.
- Comment on I Tried a Disney Secret Project! - YouTube 2 weeks ago:
I usually don’t love YouTube videos, but these are some incredibly cool things that he got some hands-on time with, so I gave it a quick skim-watch.
First, it’s cool as hell that we have confirmation that Disney is using modified Steamdecks to control some of the robots they’re using in their Star Wars themed theme parks. It was previously theorized this was the case based on photos, but this is the first confirmation I have seen. That means Disney is in some capacity an institutional purchaser of Steamdecks, which means Valve is moving into the big leagues with their products. Business-to-business sales is vastly more profitable than direct-to-consumer and having buyers as big as Disney is a big deal.
As for the Disney virtual reality tech? I’ve seen demos of it before, and he does a really excellent explainer of how it all works here. There’s multiple aspects to it, from using it to move around objects on a stage without moving a stage, think like a literal upgrade of circular stages of ages past, to allowing a person to fully explore a virtual reality world, feeling like they’re walking naturally forward, while always staying in place. It’s really fucking brilliant technology and it’s brutally sad that it’s owned by Disney exclusively because they’re bastards about copyrights, patents, and trademarks. It will be really hard to get around Disney’s legal muscle to get anything similar off the ground without paying Disney likely a mint for patent access.
Anyway, worth a watch for anyone interested.
- Comment on The Man Who Killed Google Search 3 weeks ago:
It was true tho.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 8 comments
- Comment on AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO' 3 weeks ago:
Persona Management Software has existed for at least a decade. The only difference here is you’re removing the human that controls it from the equation, because AI is now advanced enough to produce what sound like realistic responses in real-time. You used to still have to have a human with a bunch of pre-written scripts running hundreds of sockpuppet accounts through Persona Management Software. Now it’s just one step removed with the AI working with the pre-written scripts for you.
- Comment on AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO' 3 weeks ago:
“Most Reddit Addicted City” was Eglin Air Force Base in 2014. Eglin has a history of research about Persona Management Software at their facility.
That post has been pretty blackholed by the internet at this point. The bots probably started as early as 2010-2012.
- Comment on AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO' 3 weeks ago:
This is a relative upgrade of classic Persona Management Software, using an AI to produce the comments instead of a human.
I was wondering when this would leave the military and political sphere and enter the mainstream… and here we are, it’s straight being advertised pretty blatantly.
Further, it is why we need the same strict advertising laws we have for television and radio for the internet.
If it’s an ad, it should have to say it’s a fucking ad.
I’ve been pissed about this since Correct the Record and Cambridge Analytica. There is zero political willpower to do anything about it because the political groups were some of the earliest adopters of this fucking trash.
Ads, of any nature, political or otherwise, should be fucking labelled accordingly, god damn it. This isn’t fucking hard.
- Comment on Are there audiobook releases that have a visual component? 3 weeks ago:
I think these are called “films.”
Seriously, though, I do like the idea of an audio-pop-up-book. But when I was thinking about how it would work my mind said “…isn’t that just a film with extra steps?”
- Comment on Ubisoft is reportedly revoking The Crew licenses following shutdown 4 weeks ago:
This just in: Shitty and unethical company known for shitty and unethical practices and absolutely bonkers PR statements like “AAAA games” unsurprisingly continues to be shitty and unethical company. There’s not more at 11 because that’s all there is to it.
- Comment on Beeper Messaging App That Irked Apple Is Acquired by WordPress.com Owner 5 weeks ago:
I like Bypass Paywalls Clean for Firefox.
- Comment on Beeper Messaging App That Irked Apple Is Acquired by WordPress.com Owner 5 weeks ago:
Looks like we figured out Migicovsky’s plan was always the same as Pebble: wreck what was promising and then sell it off to the highest bidder.
- Comment on The Internet Archive Just Backed Up an Entire Caribbean Island 5 weeks ago:
The country of Aruba wakes up with false memories of a life on Mars…