mic_check_one_two
@mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Is it morally wrong for an immigrant or naturalized citizen to "keep a low profile" and avoid speaking up against the government in order to minimize the risks of denaturalization/deportation? 11 hours ago:
Yup, this is why allies are so important. It’s the ally’s job to be angry and belligerent when the targeted group can’t. When the targeted group needs to keep their head down, that’s when allies should be the loudest. The ally’s largest point is that they’re beyond reprisal, because they don’t belong to the targeted group.
If someone throws a slur at your friend, that friend may not be able to speak up out of fear of further harassment and/or retaliation. Also, any anger they show will be DARVO’ed around and used to paint them as the aggressor. It will be used to confirm any stereotypes that the bigot already holds; fascists and bigots regularly weaponize decorum, by saying/doing awful things to marginalized groups while pretending to be civil. Then when those people get angry, the fascist turns it around and makes the targeted group look unreasonable. When the victim needs to maintain decorum, that’s when the ally should step up.
A great example of this in action can be found here. Rep Sarah McBride is openly transgender, and Keith Self intentionally misgenders her during her introduction. Sarah throws back a quick “thank you Madam Chair” (misgendering Self) joke in response, but then leaves it at that. Rep William Keating quickly recognizes what is going on, and asks Self to repeat the introduction using McBride’s chosen pronouns. At this point, McBride steps back and doesn’t say anything else; Any anger or belligerence she shows will be used by Self to justify further marginalizing trans people. Self tries to come up with a loose explanation, but quickly flees the situation when it becomes obvious that Keating isn’t going to let the flimsy reasoning stand. Self immediately adjourns the meeting, but he only does this because Keating is the one pushing back; If McBride had been the one to push back, Self would have dug his heels in and used it to grab anti-trans soundbites for later campaigns.
- Comment on Glitter Bats!! 1 day ago:
My buddy is from South Carolina, and I distinctly remember the first time he said this. We were hanging out in his living room with some other friends, and it started to storm. He dropped the “devil’s beating his wife with a frying pan” line, and I swear it was a record scratch moment for everyone in the room. Every single person instantly stopped what they were doing, trying to process what he had just said.
- Comment on When you work for a company owned by a A..hole 2 days ago:
My office is bad about the cookie thing too. My office is split across two different buildings.
I have worked here for several years, and we only found out a month ago that the main building has free bagels in the break room every Monday morning. The main building never bothered to tell us, because it’s donated from the local bagel shop as a “there until they’re all gone” situation. And the office drones in the main building didn’t want to share, so they just never told any of us in the secondary building.
We only found out because the bagel shop wanted to do an event in our secondary building. The main building was extremely pushy about us making sure it went well, and offered a bunch of free shit too. We finally chatted to the bagel shop owner about how odd it was that the main building was so invested. She casually dropped the “oh that’s probably just because of all the free bagels we send y’all every week haha” type of comment.
Did some digging, and sure enough the owner sends like a hundred bagels over to the main building every Monday morning. She always assumed that they were sharing, because it’s way too many bagels for just the primary building… But it turns out the employees over there were just hungry hippo’ing the break room table and taking like six bagels home every week.
- Comment on When you work for a company owned by a A..hole 2 days ago:
Yeah, I’m a manager and I fully encourage my staff to take tips and gifts even though it’s against company policy. If a client offers a tip, I normally respond with something like “I don’t take tips, but if you and the part-timer want to to walk around the corner where there’s no security cameras, I’ll stay right here so I don’t see any money change hands.”
The part-timers need the money more than I do anyways. $50 won’t make a huge difference to me, but could be the determining factor in whether or not the part-timer has enough gas money to get to class next week. Plus they’re the actual boots on the ground making sure the day-to-day runs smoothly. I’m just doing paperwork and hanging out in case any big issues pop up.
- Comment on What are your favourite single-player games without much fluff, grinding or difficulty spikes? 3 days ago:
Yeah, Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry are great “no difficulty curve” games. Just the same shit on a massive map.
- Comment on Times change, but I stay the same. 4 days ago:
Fair warning, magic doesn’t scale well into the later levels. The way the game is programmed by default, your magic levels only change how much mana the various spells cost.
So for instance, as your Destruction skill increases, Destruction spells cost less. But the issue with this is that it doesn’t actually adjust your damage output; It only changes how frequently you can cast the spells. But this means later enemies start to feel extremely damage-spongey, as they have more HP and better defenses, so you’re having to throw more and more spells at them.
For other combat skills, your skill level increases the damage you do. But not the magic skills. There are mods to change that, but the vanilla experience isn’t great.
- Comment on It's only a class war when we fight back 4 days ago:
My literal first thought when I saw the meme was “Oh hi there feddy bois”
- Comment on What a weird apple 5 days ago:
Is it sad that I haven’t watched her content in like a decade, and still knew exactly who you were talking about? Like I didn’t even remember her name, but instantly went “oh yeah that one emo chick who used to be all over YouTube…”
Did some googling, and she looks even worse than she used to. Apparently people on TikTok are worried that her body is rejecting water now, which means she’s basically in the organ failure death spiral.
- Comment on 98 degrees upstairs, ac stopped working at 8am. 5 days ago:
Nah, I agree 100%. Celsius is wonderful for computers and science, but the human-tolerable range is far too small. Fahrenheit is a human-based scale, with 0-100 basically corresponding to a percentage of how much heat a person is able to/forced to hold onto. At 0, you’re not really able to hold onto any heat; you quickly reach hypothermia. At 100, you’re forced to keep nearly all of your heat, and are only able to vent trace amounts; you quickly reach hyperthermia.
It turns out, people function best when they’re keeping 40-70% of their heat (depending on how they’re acclimatized, which is determined by how much brown fat they have), so those are the temperatures that are most comfortable for us.
- Comment on It was all a lie, wasn't it? 6 days ago:
Probably. American homes are typically made with lumber and foam insulation. Older homes (pre-WW2) will use lath and plaster for the interior walls, while newer (post WW2) will use drywall (gypsum board) sheets. There are two big reasons for the differences between American and European construction.
First, Europe had the luxury of time and existing infrastructure. When people were building homes hundreds of years ago, they already had trade routes in place for things like stone. When America was being settled and people were moving west, the only things settlers had was whatever they could fit on their wagons. They weren’t carting massive quantities of quarried stone across the wilderness. And that’s assuming they even had quarried stone in the first place; There aren’t very many quarries in America, even today, because America simply doesn’t have good stone. Rome basically sits on a massive slab of marble, which is why they used so much of it in their construction. But America (with a few exceptions, like the mountains) sits on sandy clay. So if stone is incorporated into American construction, it’s usually in the form of brick (made from the aforementioned sandy clay) instead of quarried stone. But again, nobody was going to waste a ton of wagon space (and an entire team of horses to pull said wagon) to cart fucking bricks across the country. They were more focused on things like survival, and stone+mortar didn’t make the cut.
Instead, the settlers carried tools, and then used those tools to build houses out of whatever resources were local to the area they settled in. This usually meant lumber construction, because carrying a saw and axe is much easier than carrying an entire tree. And as they moved into the more sparsely wooded areas, they changed their construction methods to match; The Great Plains used wire fences instead of solid lumber fences, because there wasn’t enough wood for solid fences. Wire was easy to carry in bulk spools, and you can make the posts out of small pieces of found lumber. When they realized cattle would push the wire fences over, they started adding barbs (literally just twists of more wire) to the wires. And that’s how barbed wire fences were invented, and became prolific throughout the area. Not because they were the best at fencing, but because they were good enough and were extremely resource-efficient for what the settlers had laying around.
The second reason is climate. It can be difficult to get Europeans to understand the sheer destructive force of American weather patterns. My buddy from the UK came to visit, and we had a thunder+hail storm while he was here. He was hunkered down below the table, worried that the windows were all about to shatter. Meanwhile, we were just watching TV like it was no big deal. The tornado sirens hadn’t gone off yet, and the hail was only the size of pennies, so we hadn’t even started to worry about it. To us, it was just a regular storm, but my buddy said it was the worst storm he had ever encountered… We had three more storms just like it during his two week stay. Lumber construction is surprisingly good at resisting high winds. Stone will tend to crumble, while lumber will bend and flex. The lumber house sounds like it’s falling apart, but that’s just the creaking and groaning from the joints. And that’s just in regular winds; If an actual tornado comes through, anything less than solid concrete will quickly fall apart. And even the concrete isn’t a for sure thing, as the tornado may just decide to pick the entire foundation slab up.
- Comment on Yes, this is what people did back then 1 week ago:
Yeah, anyone who answers with anything besides “invest in the tech companies you know will get huge, then get into bitcoin early and ride it all the way to $100k each” is going to fail to thrive.
- Comment on Fan-made Mario Kart 64 PC port released, with track editor and ultrawide support 1 week ago:
like they like to do with fan games/projects/etc.
Cries while staring at the defunct AM2R project
- Comment on Fan-made Mario Kart 64 PC port released, with track editor and ultrawide support 1 week ago:
Not really; The emulator doesn’t use any copyrighted code, but the ROM is copyrighted. That’s just basic IP law.
What is fucked up logic is Nintendo encrypting their ROMs, then providing decryption keys on the console. So the emulator itself is legal, but actually booting a ROM requires decrypting it, which requires keys from a legitimate console. Nintendo has argued that those keys are illegal to use in an emulator, even if the user rips them directly from the console that they own. So you have the keys. You own the console they’re stored on. But it’s illegal to use those keys anywhere except on the console they came on, because Nintendo said so.
- Comment on After Israel and USA's bombing, wouldn't any supposed nuclear bombs go off if there were any? 1 week ago:
Yes, that’s one of the primary concerns. The nuclear material isn’t likely to actually explode, but the material can easily get spread by an explosion. Essentially turning a bunker buster bomb into a giant dirty bomb.
- Comment on I'm not okay. 1 week ago:
Mowing isn’t the issue; Raking leaves is. Fireflies lay eggs in the fall, on dead leaves. Since suburban HOAs require leaves to be raked and trashed, it removes the fireflies’ breeding grounds. If you don’t like leaves on your lawn, just fucking mulch them with your lawn mower instead of raking them. A perfectly raked yard is an ecological wasteland.
- Comment on I'm not okay. 1 week ago:
Yeah, fireflies lay eggs on dead leaves. The ultra-clean suburban yards are killing firefly populations, because people keep raking up the fireflies breeding material and throwing it away in plastic trash bags. A perfectly kept lawn is an ecological wasteland, and suburban trends have expanded that wasteland for miles at a time. It’s no wonder fireflies have struggled to survive.
Want to see fireflies? Stop raking your lawn. If you don’t like the way the leaves look, mulch them with a lawn mower early in the season, so they can blend in with the grass. But don’t just fucking rake them up and throw them away.
- Comment on Why is the progress pride flag so poorly designed (especially the intersex progress pride flag)? Will it be redesigned? 1 week ago:
Each color had a specific meaning, but none of those meanings were a specific gender or sexuality. The meanings were intentionally tied to concepts, rather than to distinct groups of people. This was so it could encompass everyone. But then dumbasses started trying to claim specific colors as their own, which excluded people. And so then every group suddenly started making their own flags, since they were being excluded by the people claiming one of the colors on the rainbow.
- Comment on Limited Run has asked Nintendo to pull Gex Trilogy from the eShop as it doesn’t work on Switch 2 1 week ago:
It definitely hasn’t aged well, but that’s largely because the humor was based on pop culture references. Talking about Jessica Simpson isn’t really cool anymore. But that the time, it was a sort of revolutionary thing to have games reference current pop culture. It made the games feel fresh, especially if you played them right at launch.
Were they great games? No. But from a gaming culture standpoint, they had a surprisingly large impact. Game devs learned what did and didn’t work in regards to the references and gameplay, and that alone makes them culturally important.
Also, games deserve to be preserved even if they didn’t have a massive impact on gaming. Even old Flash games have massive preservation efforts, because every single game was someone’s pet project. Imagine saying the same thing about a bad film. Sure, a modern 4k re-release may not need to exist, but that keeps it in modern formats and makes preservation easier.
- Comment on no way right 1 week ago:
My current bet is on a widespread organized mass assassination attempt on multiple lawmakers. Hit them all at the same time, so their security can’t see the pattern and put them under protection before they’re killed. Off a bunch of democrats, then use the ensuing chaos to seize control and “postpone” the midterms.
- Comment on Why is my GPU's "3D" usage spiking so wildly when I'm not even playing a game? It keeps throttling up and throttling down and the noise is extremely annoying 1 week ago:
That was actually my guess too. A failing hard drive will tend to make a rapid clicking/grinding noise, as the read/write heads repeatedly snap back and forth across the discs.
- Comment on Bestbuy decided to use fucking **DOORDASH** to deliver my order, I couldn't cancel it. Today I was supposed to get it, and I saw the driver stealing the package after marking it as delivered. 1 week ago:
They can also entirely lose the ability to process cards if they have too many chargebacks. It’s largely an issue for smaller businesses, (there’s no way Visa is going to cut off a giant retailer like BestBuy), but it’s something to keep in mind.
- Comment on What's the e-reader you would buy if you were in the market? 1 week ago:
Kobo Libra is the same form factor as a Kindle Oasis.
- Comment on What's the e-reader you would buy if you were in the market? 1 week ago:
FWIW, the price is largely due to patent issues; The company that owns the patent to produce e-ink screens has started exorbitantly jacking up prices for device makers. Ironically, e-ink used to be much cheaper, before that e-ink company started messing with the supply.
- Comment on What's the e-reader you would buy if you were in the market? 1 week ago:
Yeah, I read a lot of comics, so the Kobo Libra Color has been amazing. But there’s no doubting that the color screen compromises on clarity and contrast.
- Comment on What's the e-reader you would buy if you were in the market? 1 week ago:
Yeah, Readarr is unfortunately the black sheep of the Arr stack. Ebook torrents are notorious for failing/stalling, and the Readarr team has had some major issues with their metadata server in the past year or so, meaning adding new authors/books is often impossible.
It can be nice for tracking what you’re missing, but I end up using manual searches for most of my ebooks. Ebooks tend to work best with direct downloads, (Z-Library, Anna’s Archive, etc) so an Arr service reliant on torrents is spotty, at best. It isn’t even actively being developed, and the devs still attached to the project have even said that it will likely stagnate and fall into disrepair unless a serious dev is willing to take over the project.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
I was actually going to suggest Red Dead Redemption 2. The English you learn may be a little bit dated (and have a heavy southern drawl) but you’ll learn a lot.
- Comment on Real af 2 weeks ago:
Psh, that’s a problem for future-me. The only problem is that future-me quickly becomes current-me… And current-me is continually reminded that past-me is a prick.
- Comment on Is it weird I sleep with an old blanket I've had since I was a young girl? 2 weeks ago:
My wife is in her 30’s, and she sleeps with a pillow and stuffed animal that she has had since she was 3 or 4.
- Comment on A game you "didn't know it was bad 'til people told you so"? 2 weeks ago:
And inversely, games like RuneScape that changed to be more casual, which pissed off all of the tryhard players.
- Comment on A game you "didn't know it was bad 'til people told you so"? 2 weeks ago:
The parkour handled slightly differently, and that angered a lot of the fans from the first game. They also drastically changed the way the grapple worked. The combat was also slightly different, (critics would say simplified) so it tended to be more straightforward. The first game had you doing a lot of jumping and diving just to survive, whereas the second game gave you some more survival options to avoid getting trapped by mobs.