Infrapink

@Infrapink@thebrainbin.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Ye were in the Let Them Eat Cake phase in the 1980s. This is the Storming The Bastille phase

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If "James Bond" is a codename, would a hypothetical female operative filling the same role receive the same codename?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It's actually standard practice for secret agents to use their real names, as accidentally failing to respond to a pseudonym is one if the easiest ways to blow their cover.

  Furthermore, Bond is a secret agent. The fact that he's a spy who has tons if amazing adventures is not public knowledge, let alone well-known. We the audience know James Bond as a super-popular action hero from a long series of movies, but in his own universe there is nothing particularly special or noteworthy about the name James Bond.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you call the beleif that gods are just higher beings on other planes of existence?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In European polytheism, there isn't a clear division between the mundane and the divine, like you see in Christianity.

  There are gods all over the place. Your house has a couple of gods in it. They aren't powerful enough to kill you with lightning on a clear day, but they will still annoy you unless you leave out a little food for them.

  Specifically in the Greek context, Protogenoi, Titans, Olympians, Gigantes, Nereids, Gorgons, Furies, Fates, Muses, and Nymphs are all gods of varying strength and prominence. Everybody worshipped Zeus, but only your family worships the house gods.

  Likewise, in Scandinavia, you have your Aesir, Vanir, Jötunn, Dwarves, Elves, and so on. Gaels have the Sídhe, Fomoire, Tuatha Dé Dannann, Leprecháns, and whatever else. To an Arab pagan, djinn were a form of minor deity. The kami of Shinto continue to encompass everything from local spirits to the supreme creator, to the point that Japanese Christians and Muslims refer to God as Kami-sama.

  [Much more info here]https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/)

  When Christianity caught on, other gods were out, but that didn't stop people honoring their local house gods. Small gods were reïmagined as fairies; Christian clergy denied their reality, but belief in fairies was mostly seen as a harmless superstition, like not stepping on a crack in the road. Belief in fairies persists in Ireland; ironically, those who genuinely believe in the old gods are the most devout Catholics.

  We see a similar phenomenon across history and culture. When Christianity met Vodún, people didn't stop believing in their indigenous gods; instead, those gods became spirits who God put in charge of particular aspects of the cosmos, which is how we get Vodou.

  Likewise, Zarathustra was a polytheist, but by the time Islam rose, Zoroastrians were down to two gods, with the others recast as basically angels. This concept in turn influenced Judaism and Samaritanism; Yahweh, the Hebrews' patron deity, merged with El, the Semitic supreme deity, and the other gods became angels.

  Because Christianity caught on as the Western Roman Empire was disintegrating, people felt like they were living through an apocalypse. Clergy said that, while the physical world was collapsing, the world to come was brilliant, and thus a sharp division was drawn between the mundane and the divine. Modern Euramericans are raised with this division; whatever our beliefs or lack thereof, we see it as fundamental, and thus retroactively and anachronistically apply it to pre-Christian paganism, whereas the pagans saw the divine as simply part of the world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why did Thanos, with the power of all the infinity stones, never think to try doubling the amount of resources in the world?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They don't call him the Sane Titan.

  And he's purple because he's an alien who Jim Starlin gave purple skin.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introverts of our era spend their time on their computers, but what did introverts do before? Like when literacy rates were lower (pre-1950s)? Or before the printing press?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Before the printing press, introverted men worked the farm, while introverted women spun thread, made and repaired clothes, cooked, cleaned, nursed babies, and also worked the farm.

  this is the same as what extroverts did, because back then, you contributed to the farm and the household whether you liked it or not.

  At a celebration or festival, the introverts might gather in a corner to tell stories, but there was no way to avoid being part of the community back then.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I can't say I am going to kill the president. But can the president specify me a civ saying he is going to kill me? And it be legal?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Civilian

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG: We’re thrilled to announce that the Crysis Remastered Trilogy has joined our catalog, and the original Crysis is now part of the GOG Preservation Program!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So weird to think that Crysis is retro now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doug Bowser Retiring From Nintendo, Successor Announced⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Point of order: Wii Sports was not free. The price of the game was added to the price of the Wii, but since you couldn't get a Wii without Wii Sports, people just assumed that was the base price.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Favorite Modded Console?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience, it's actually a little easier; Wii hacks sometimes need multiple attempts, but the Wii U hack works first time.

  Alas, there is much less Wii U homebrew, but you can hack the vWii just like a Wii to get all that goodness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Favorite Modded Console?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Wii U for me. It has all the Wii stuff, plus Wii U games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some franchises with characters that personify countries?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It even has two Frances!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the first electronic device kids get these days? (Desktop, Laptop, Tablet, Phone, Game consoles?)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Mine was a NES. My dad had a 286 running DOS. I remember when my primary school got a PC with Windows 95, and I was gobsmacked that it booted to Windows directly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hypothetically, if you have memory problems and need to write down events, is there a system which you can verify that its not tampered with? (Like a digital checksum, but for a journal)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Write your journal by hand, with a pen or pencil on paper. You'll know you wrote it because it's your handwriting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is This Social Media?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I use it to follow several ladies who post to multiple communities on lemmynsfw.com.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is This Social Media?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on how you define social media.

  Some people say it refers to any online social interaction platform, including forums, Usenet, IRC, and even email; the logical conclusion of this point of view is that the phone network is social media, and one can make the case that so is the postal service. This definition strikes me as too broad; I feel like it was dreamt up by people who have never known a world without facebook.com and try to force predecessors into a bucket where they don't belong.

  Personally, I would define social media as online communication systems which are account-oriented rather than conversation-oriented. Forums and pre-web communication systems are conversation-oriented. Yes, you have an account on a forum, but the forum is structured around threads. You can get notified of replies to a thread, and you might be able to follow individual threads, but you don't follow individual accounts. Same with Usenet; there are some workarounds to follow individual people, but the entire network is based around threads. IRC doesn't even need an account.

  Social media is all about accounts; the whole idea is that you follow individual people rather than threads. I would further divide social media into post-based and file-based. Post-based social media is built around text posts. Replies to posts are the same as the post they reply to. Posts can have other media attached, but are still text posts with pictures, videos, or sound files stuck on. This includes MySpace, Facebook, the website formerly known as Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, BlueSky, Mastodon, Sharkey, Akkoma, Friendica, Threads.net, and so forth.

  In file-based social media, posts consist of non-text files; responses and replies to posts are not the same as the posts themselves. This is things like YouTube, PeerTube (video), Instagram, Pixelfed (pictures), and Castopod (audio files).

  ActivityPub allows post-based and file-based social media to interact with each other. Somebody can post a video with PeerTube, and get replies with Mastodon and Sharkey.

  Then there's what might be called the Slashdot model, which covers Slashdot, Fark, Digg, Reddit, Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed, and Substrings. Reddit is an interesting case of something which was not originally social media, but became social media when the people in charge added the ability to follow individual accounts, and have been trying their darndest to add in more and more features from traditional social media.

  And that brings us to the threadiverse. Threadiverse programmes are built on ActivityPub, the same protocol that powers Mastodon, Sharkey, Akkoma, Friendica, PeerTube, and Pixelfed, all of which are social media. You use Lemmy, specifically, lemmy.world, and posted this question to a community on the same instance. Lemmy does not currently allow users to follow individual accounts, and thus under my definition, it does not qualify as social media.

  However. I use Mbin, and thus I would refer to @NoStupidQuestions as a magazine rather than a community. (Actually, I mostly use Mastodon, but I'm posting this with my Mbin account). Mbin does allow users to follow individual accounts; in fact, I follow several Lemmy accounts, and I can directly follow your account as well, right from the web interface. I could also follow your account with my Mastodon account. This means that even if Lemmy fails the definition of social media, it looks and acts just like social media to a bunch of things that do.

  So is Lemmy social media? Honestly, yeah, I'd say so. Maybe it isn't social media to Lemmy users, but it is to most of the rest of the Fediverse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there any social media without memes and US politics?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The whole point of the Internet has always been to spread memes.

  Because the Internet is a communication medium, and communication is made of memes. I'm not joking. Words, language, music, and art are all memes. (The concept of memes is also a meme). Before the Internet, there was ARPAnet, email, IRC, and BBS boards; all about communication, and thus memes.

  Before that, there was the phone network. Before that, the post office. Before that, books, pamphlets, and people telling stories down the pub or around the campfire. All memes.

  In fact, this very post is made of memes. The previous sentence contains at least nine memes – the words In, fact, this, very, post, is, made, of, and memes. But there are more memes in there. The phrase in fact combines the words in and fact to make a new meme – in this case, when those two words combine, it asserts more forcefully that the overall statement is true. There's also the spaces between the words, which makes reading the sentence much easier. Yes, believe it or not, spaces between words is a meme. Before the 8th century AD, WORDSWEREWRITTENINALLCAPSWITHNOSPACESBETWEENTHEM. Alcuin of York, a scribe and poet at the court of Emperor Charlemagne, came up with the ideas of lowercase letters and spaces between words to make reading easier, and his ideas were so popular that they spread across most of Christendom. Those memes were so successful that people think of them as natural and obvious parts of (alphabetic) writing, but they aren't. They aren't even a millennium old.

  Writing is another meme, going way back to the Stone Age, and it has evolved and developed into numerous other memes, such as the Roman alphabet (which I am using right now), Arabic script, Chinese characters, the Cyrillic alphabet, Brahmic script, Ge'ez alphabet, the Greek alphabet, Cherokee script, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and many others.

  Asking for social media without memes is like asking for food without proteins, fats, or carbohydrates. It's like asking for sunlight without electromagnetic radiation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would happen to the US if it denaturalised and deported all non-whites?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Whites” today now comprise literally every fair skinned ethnic background that isn’t east Asian. I shit you not, I think Hispanics who are fair skinned will be the next group subsumed into the white category

  Funny story. Before the 1980s, Hispanic people were considered white. (Modern people praise I Love Lucy for including an "interracial" marriage, but people in the 1950s just saw a white couple). But since Hispanic people in America tend to be a bit culturally distinct from the ruling class, other white people wanted to be racist against them, and so the meme arose and spread that people of Spanish and Portuguese descent are a race distinct from all other people of European descent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do females got to be so hard to talk or flirt with?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There's also ladies, which has been popular for a while. Chicas has some currency in places with large Hispanic populations.

  We also had dames and broads in the 1930s, but those have fallen out of favour.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There's more to it than that.

  Nintendo have spent decades meticulously building up a powerful brand image. As such, there are people who are fans of Nintendo the company/brand to an extent you don't see with Sony or Microsoft; other company's individual games have fans, but you don't get Microsoft Fans or XBox Fans so much as Halo Fans. This means Nintendo's games and hardware reïnforce each other; someone who bought a Switch for Mario and Zelda is the sort of person who thinks "Ooh, Fire Emblem!" and buys that, too.

  Plus, if you've gone to the trouble of buying a Nintendo console for one or two games, there is a psychological urge to justify your choice, to make it worth your while. So if you just got it for Mario and Zelda, well then you've spent hundreds of euros on a machine to play two games. But if you also get Fire Emblem, that's three games. Kirby brings it up to four. Thus, every exclusive makes the console purchase feel more reasonable.

  Then there are sales breakdowns. Nintendo gets 100% of the non-tax price of every one of their own games. To give a concrete example, Donkey Kong Bananza costs €69.99. Nintendo get €56.90 of that (€69.99 less 23% VAT). If they sell it elsewhere, they lose another 30% of the non-tax price in store fees. Thus, if they were to bring Donkey Kong Bananza to Steam, they would only get €39.83 per copy (€56.90 × 0.7). They would thus need to sell 1.43 times as many copies on Steam to make the same money as selling them on the eShop.

  That's the big thing right there. Some people for sure decide to go without Nintendo games if they aren't on other platforms. A subset of those people would be willing to buy Nintendo games on other platforms. But is that cohort at least 43% the size of the cohort who just buy a Nintendo console?

  But, of course, Nintendo don't just sell their games on the eShop. There are also tons of third-party games, each of which pay 30% of their non-tax price per purchase. If somebody has a Nintendo console, even if those third-party games are on Steam and PlayStation, they might buy those games on the Switch instead. (Source: I have done this. If you own a Switch, so have you). That's another chunk of money Nintendo would lose out on if they weren't selling consoles.

  In conclusion, for third-party developers, being multi-platform is good. But for Nintendo, a first-party developer, keeping their games exclusive is the logical choice.