General Discussion Thread - Juche 113, Week 18

Some Chinese company decided to sponsor the local pro basketball team here and instead of thinking: 'good for the team', the media is al like: 'SHOULD WE BE CAREFUL FOR CHINESE SPYING?'. Like, surely it is the utmost importance for China to be able to spy on a mediocre basketball team in a country that doesn't like basketball.

How do westerners fall for cold war propaganda? Read a textbook
- Their textbooks are also full of red scare propaganda. From the moment they are born they are bombed with red scare propaganda, its fairly hard to get out of that indoctrination.
- An absolute fuck ton of it disguised as something new (by changing a couple words) from the moment you're born until something pulls you out of the circle of influence.
I think it would be hilarious for Chinese companies to just start sponsoring tons of sports teams in the US, no strings attached, just money. And watch the American people implode with paranoia of their own making.
I hope this happens in my small town it would be so funny
Oh my gosh, how have I never put this together before???

Red Scare + Yellow Peril = Orange Squirrel!!!!!

Went down to the US for the weekend to visit gamer friends. I'm driving in a school zone and slowed down as a result, there were y'know kids everywhere crossing the street. A USian then speeds behind me, barely avoids plowing into my back, then slows down to hang out of the car, yelling about how slowing down was bad for their dog. Then at the next few lights they tried to ram and brake check us, again hanging out of their car yelling slurs and murderous threats.

White americans are so fucking absurd, I grew up there and they will all kill if you even look at their ridiculously abused pets the wrong way. Like a friend was bit once and got pepper sprayed when she tried to stop the dog. Not saying Canadians are much better (in a lot of ways we're worse and more mask off with our racism), but USians are a special kind of unhinged. I constantly have to remind myself that just about every single white person in Canada or the US is descended from someone that killed to live there

"Guys, I'm not Korean. I'm SOUTH Korean. Get it right, I'm one of the good Asians."

-Bootlicking Chan

Once again, death to the Zionist Entity.

I just want to thank the comrades here for your links, your summaries, your curation, your analysis, your opinions, and your memes.

You make the Internet a better place.

alternate thumbnail (CW: Zionist being blown up)

A year ago I wouldn't have thought I would be going out regularly with new trans friends. I'm so grateful for that. Every day I relate less and less to loneliness, although when I do feel lonely now the loneliness is more extreme.

I feel you 100%.

I hope you all have a nice week :D

I just encountered a man on Twitter who has a suspiciously bloodthirsty and fast responding audience despite being a literal nobody with nothing to his name. Bots or is the right wing reactionary brainrot just that strong?

Just that strong sadly. I don't think I've ever seen actual bots, or that many, just really, really sad idiots.

A new week.

We are having a party event this week. Looking forward to it. It's supposed to be better weather this week too but this is still Belgium, so I'll believe it when I see it.

And, most importantly, it is labour day on Wednesday.

very hyped for labour day
- Are you going to do anything special? Lots of marches and activities going on.

Had to delete my previous account cause it was too close to my public profile as a producer and I don't wanna dox myself

But that also means I probably can't link my music here either 😭 a sacrifice I'll just have to make cause living in the imperial core is gonna get even more dangerous in the near future

Keep in mind that many of your comments are likely backed up on archive.org (and possibly similar websites, or even Lemmy instances that federate with Lemmygrad but don't synchronize account deletions). If it's important, the safest option is to create an account with a different name and pretend like you're a new user
- I also probably should have nuked all my posts and comments too 😰 whoops, didn't think about that
- I think archive may be looking at hard times soon idk how their appeal is going

In what can only be described as a quarter life crisis I have decided to get a buzz cut and dye my hair blonde lmao

The HelloChinese app is fairly good, i've been steadily learning characters for over a month now.

This day 206 years ago comrade Karl Marx was born. 🫡

It is very humbling (and equally depressing) to understand that the trailblazers and martyrs of their time have been fighting and dying for this truth for over a century and a half and things are still the way they are; and yet I find myself feeling things will come to a head this decade or the next. Imagine if it does. Happy birthday and rest in peace, Karl. The wheel of time is in motion and it will vindicate us all.
- We stand in the shoulder of giants!
Historical materialism wouldve been developed regardless but damn did he accelerate the development of this theory by decades.

There is some free software on which I occasionally provide feedback, and I decided to go to the developers’ forum and submit my feedback there. This time my feedback was about typos, which for a coder should be the easiest thing in the world to fix. (Am I wrong?) I reused somebody else’s thread on the same problem, to which the designers had happily attended earlier, until I contributed to it. This was their reply to the typos that I found:

You can submit a pull request with corrections.

First of all, no, I can’t, and second… can they seriously not figure out how to take notes from others? Why do I need to submit a ‘pull request’ for a typographical error? What is the g‐ddamn point in handling this issue bureaucratically? I mean, if these were professionals who worked on this for a living, then yeah, I’d expect them to act grossly incompetent. But when it’s volunteers doing it, that’s something else.

At least they try to work on this software on a regular basis. With nearly all professional game designers, it’s pump and dump. For example, I submitted requests to Nightdive Studios and Bethesda Softworks for some very simple fixes: implementing some unused sounds, implementing some unused animations, restoring a few sounds (which I happily provided), implementing some unused text messages, and implementing an NPC sequence. None of those except for one could be described as ‘ambitious’ for a coder. Do you know how many of my requests they implemented? Zero. Zero of my requests.

I was not the only one screwed over either. A couple of years ago I saw somebody describe a level that crashes when a player touches a certain spot, and I saw an employé explicitly acknowledge it. It’s been two years, and yep, the crash is still there; anybody can trigger it simply by moving into the spot. Judas Priest, this is the kind of shit that a modder could fix and yet somehow the professionals can’t be bothered.

Must be a bureucratic mess to not even bother fixing simple stuff, or the devs are overloaded with work from other projects, or they are just lazy af.

Especially on Bethesda, like i bought F04 last week and the game is barely playable, they even made a "next gen patch" last week but i still can't play above 60fps because dialogue breaks.
Speaking as a FOSS maintainer, typos should be trivial to fix as long as it's in a language the devs are fluent in. The kind of up front work you mentioned putting in to your tickets is practically the platonic ideal of a good issue.

Speaking also as a corpo codemonkey (like the people at Bethesda), management and product consistently — through short-sighted hair-brained schemes and giving zero shits about what actually goes into making a software product — raise a shit ton of barriers to getting even simple things done. This leaves little choice but to make quick but shoddy ways of implementing features to meet the deadline, which in turn creates tech-debt which is itself a barrier.

I could understand the "just make a pull request, bro" response if someone comes in demanding a vaguely defined feature that seemingly no one else has expressed interest in. We've used that answer several times for issues raised for Lemmy. In your case though, the response seems unwarranted.
Am I wrong

Only if it is translated and they use the original english as the "key", i.e. changing the English breaks the translations. Otherwise it is very easy.
It would be cool if indie devs were immune to this but I've had early access devs argue with me about why they shouldn't have to fix bugs which broke the main questline in their game etc. Generally am pirating that shit because fuck Eaccess
- Oh wow, that is awful. I thought that these designers were being difficult for neglecting some aesthetic issues, but refusing to address game‐breaking bugs? The only excuse that they have is that they are so tired from work or family life that they don’t feel like jacking around with their projects. In which case, it would be better to officially put them on hold rather than arguing with people. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time for everyone.

Went to the university i'm going to next fall's encampment. It's crazy to go from high school where i could barely find anyone supportive of palestine(supportive enough to actually take action. most people were supportive but like no one did anything which pisses me off to no end but tangent aside) to a full on encampment. food was bussin tho

Semester 4 starts tomorrow and it’s going to be a doozy due to the fact that it’s a expedited semester (13 weeks of course content condensed into 2.5 weeks, ouch). This semester of Political Science is about the history, so we have to read Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, also a guy named Augustine. For this class I have to write an Exegesis as well, it’s something I’ve never heard of before but it seems hard (I have to write one on a book/“chapter” from Plato’s Republic), I’ve never done something like this. I am nervous due to the amount of readings and papers; and each class is 3 hours a day!

This is just History of Politics Part 1, Part 2 is held in June and both are separate classes (meaning they have their own credits). I also have a history course that spans May and June (it’s online) and is about post-1867, in this class I have to write a paper about the unsolved murder of William Robinson with the goal of figuring out who killed him.

This is going to be a strange semester…

Also as a side note, I hate how there are separate students loans (provincial vs federal). I’ve been taking out provincial ones when I should’ve been taking out federal as they don’t have an interest rate anymore. Provincial loans will have an interest rate 12 months after school, that’s fucking dumb, why are they different? They should be the same thing. I want to understand provincial sovereignty but at the same time I find it incredibly annoying. Semester 5 and onwards (including Masters) will be with federal loans because fuck interest rates. The interest still shouldn’t apply until I’m out of school but I’ll make sure to call my province’s loan people to make sure I don’t have to pay early because I switched to federal.

Fun fact (has nothing to do with school) I have a document on my tablet that just lists a bunch of ideas for posts I want to make here. If I have a “good” question/theme for a post I write it in the document so I don’t forget and when I have the time/willpower I can write it here.

I just finished the Republic. Interesting book, kinda weird. I can see the connections to modern politics.

Re post ideas - I write any idea I have for a meme or whatever in my journal along with all my other thoughts.

Has Iran responded yet to Israel's last attack on them?

Do they need to respond at this point? They kinda proved whatever they needed to with the first one. Israel now knows for sure that it would be in trouble if it insisted on taking things further than this show of saving face. Hopefully Iran is willing to accept that it's made it's point and decides not to retaliate to the retaliation against it's retaliation for Israel's consular attack. To keep us that step further from WWIII and all that.
There was ANOTHER!?!?!?
- A small one, I think.

That thumbnail goes hard.

I just learned the Schwarzschild (the guy who solved Einstein's equation for perfectly spherical, unmoving mass) had volunteered to do ballistic calculation for the german army on the eastern front during ww2 💀

That was during WWI. He died in 1916

I am presently reading Katherine Aron‐Beller’s Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators, and I especially enjoy the fact how even prior to the first millennium, xenophobic gentiles were portraying Jews (based on the slimmest of evidence) as being partners in crime with whoever was the public enemy of the day, such as Muslims or even competing Christian denominations. One brief example:

During the reign of Constantine V (741–775) who is considered the most “iconoclastic” emperor of the eighth and ninth centuries, iconophiles associated their iconoclast opponents and their position on idolatry with Jews, typically denouncing them as blasphemers and destroyers of images.⁷⁸

We’re all familiar with the more recent iteration known as ‘Judeo‐Bolshevism’, and we may be witnessing a more complex iteration now where ‘bad Jews’ like George Soros (not that I admire him unjokingly) are responsible for the recent university protests and for Hamas’s present funding. Since merely blaming ‘the Jews’ for these protests would be too confusing, the Zionist distinctions between ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews’ could come in handy.

Read about the Free State out of curiosity. Wtf this is so fucked up.

Thinking about the Tito fridge magnet I declined to buy at a tobacco stand in rural Croatia cause it was of highly dubious quality and the lady wanted €4, wish I had it on my fridge now smh