Thevenin @ Thevenin @beehaw.org

Posts

4

Comments

153

Joined

2 yr. ago

Nobody Cares If Music Is Real Anymore

I'm nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too?

It's highly dependent on the music and context. As pointed out in this study, strategic application of the wrong music at the wrong time can inflict measurable pain.

All they have to do is look outside or step outside themselves and lend someone, anyone a hand.

Touch grass, if you will.

I remember years ago watching a video -- I desperately wish I could remember the channel -- where the author shared his experience with depression and the early days of 4chan anime forums. He found it easier to browse forums about anime than to go out and actually watch them. Then the negativity piled in. That anime you like? "It's shit." Any hint of optimism or passion was an opportunity to get a rise out of someone or smugly ridicule them. The only unassailable belief was to doubt everything. The only winning move was not to care.

I've been thinking about that video a lot recently.

Online activism has led to a handful of noteworthy victories. But the ease of online activism has also made people (myself included) rely too much on it, and get disillusioned by it, as if we've forgotten that online activism is pointless unless it leads to real-world resistance.

I don't believe doomer trolls are right-wing plants (though I acknowledge it's a potential avenue of attack in the future). I don't think they usually have ulterior accelerationist motives (though I have spoken with a few). I think for the most part, they're just people who've given up, or otherwise mistaken cynicism for maturity, and seeing anyone else expressing optimism or trying to organize real-world resistance just pisses them off.

Voluntarily disenfranchising yourself is complying in advance.

A broken tool still has its uses. A bent screwdriver can still be a prybar. A rusty sword can still kill, so don't ask people to drop it before have something better. It is possible to explore and acknowledge the failures and limitations of a system -- and to reduce overreliance on it -- without abdicating all influence over it.

The Democratic Party is a disappointment. They follow popular (polled) opinion rather than sticking to principles, and that makes them vulnerable to Overton shifts. As public opinion towards trans people has been poisoned by the Jugendverderber libel, Democrats have largely thrown trans people under the bus instead of fighting back. Likewise, Democrats stick closely to corporate interests because money is power. These issues may never be fixable.

The solution to this is not to capitulate and discard what political influence we still hold.

The first half of the solution is to primary the hell out of Democrats. A left-wing caucus within the party could easily tilt things in our favor, just like the Freedom Caucus tilted the RNC in the opposite direction once before. Bernie Sanders (link) and David Hogg (link) are now spearheading multiple campaigns to do exactly that. Even if you have no faith in your ability to change the norms of the party, just think how much impact your resistance could have if you held an office, even a low one, even for just a week. Do you have any idea how much trouble a county clerk can make?

The second half of the solution is to build solidarity-based power structures outside government to reduce overreliance on a broken system. Economic desperation, social isolation, and cultural "other"-ing make people easy to exploit and oppress regardless of the type of government, so attack those problems directly. Unions, mutual aid networks, churches, you know the drill. Put in the legwork to find them in your area or your profession.

Embrace nuance. Embrace diversity -- even political diversity. Political beliefs are not sacred, but the lives under those political systems are. Don't try to reduce the vast complexity of politics to 120 characters. Don't treat the ongoing wellbeing of human beings flippantly. If you think the problem is the existence of a state, then say so, but make your case for why making the state worse makes conditions for its subjects better. If you think voting third-party will teach the Democrats a lesson and drag them leftwards, then make your case and acknowledge the risks of what happens if you're wrong.

Don't just ridicule every positive effort you see. Doomer trolls (or cuckoos, if we're going with that) are pithy, but reductive, and their criticism is never constructive.

@remington is all about healthy discussion. He doesn't mind when people disagree, just as long as they say why.

Are the stabbing pains skin-deep like an insect sting, or deeper like a pulled muscle?

I just moved into my first house. The president is using modern-day gestapo to disappear undesirables and political dissidents against supreme court orders. My career work has paid off and I have a nice new job and there are dogs in the office. The party I vote for now thinks it's a winning strategy to throw trans people under the bus. Probably thanks to social transition and HRT, I'm getting a grip on my social anxiety and expanding my friend group. I carry pepper spray when I'm alone now.

My life is coming together right as the world falls apart. I am filled all at once with indescribable hope and unfathomable dread. Hell of a thing to find your soul during an apocalypse.

I could make one of these, but first I'll need to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.

I won't say that they're too smart for that (lol), but this administration has been known to walk back major policy changes after powerful interest groups object. See also: H1B visas.

I will update the post if I can confirm that. Until then, I'm treating it as a rumor. I don't know if it's dangerous to apply for a gender marker correction now, but I do know it's pointless.

EDIT: I've found first-hand confirmation of original documents being withheld. See edit in post.

Based on current information, no. But they would reject a passport renewal.

Yeah, the video really isn't making the point its title suggests. I think we're all just primed to expect gatekeeping in video games at this point.

If you're using Retroarch, I've found this overview useful. https://thingsiplay.game.blog/2024/10/19/showcase-for-retroarch-shaders-2024/

I strongly disagree with the premise that there's a "wrong" way to play retro games. Don't gatekeep. Imagine if people told you not to listen to Pink Floyd unless it's on vinyl. It would be lost media.

That said, CRTs present images fundamentally differently than LCD displays, and a lot of developers took advantage of those idiosyncrasies. There are scanlines everywhere. CRT phosphors aren't square, and appear smaller when darker. Bright pixels can "bleed" into nearby pixels, particularly when using composite signals.

Before LCDs, many (not all) pixel artists used this to their advantage, basically harnessing the imperfections of analog TV to provide equivalents to anti-aliasing, bloom, extra color depth, and even transparency. Some particularly famous examples came from Sega Genesis games. This video goes into good depth on the whys and hows, and there are some solid examples of the outcomes here.

I've attached examples below (hopefully they upload). If you like the raw pixel art, then no harm done. Enjoy! But if you like the way CRTs interpreted and filtered those signals, you owe it to yourself to look up some shaders for your favorite emulator.

(Zero Tolerance, 1994, on the Genesis/Mega Drive)

(Sonic the Hedgehog 2, 1992, on the Genesis/Mega Drive)

Oh shit, you're one of today's lucky 10,000.

Click the link and read. Just trust me on this. I can't tell you why without spoiling it.

I've started playing through some classic SNES and GBA games.

Chrono Trigger -- Oh man, this one's good. The soundtrack is on fire, and the game does a good job at making you feel like your actions make a difference.

Metroid Fusion -- If you told me this was made in 2024, I'd probably believe you. It has a sense of pacing and suspense that I wasn't expecting for a metroidvania.

I haven't gotten very far in either, but so far it's looking like they've aged like wine.

I gotta say, this was a weird week to start HRT.

I don't know whether or not an entire month is the right timeframe, but I definitely agree with the principle of counting to ten before you speak. I've already made at least one discussion worse by failing to consider my tone. If my ideas are worth sharing now, they'll be worth sharing when the moratorium is over, and they'll only gain nuance by being left in the oven for longer.

They made their decisions and you made yours. If you decided that we'd be better off with Trump, that's on you. Own it.

Putting Trump in office makes Gaza worse. He's promised us as much. Maybe you proved a point to the Democrats, and maybe you didn't. Maybe now they'll lean even harder to the center. Who knows. That's a gamble you took, and you made steep sacrifices to make that gamble.

Gambling with someone's life to make a political point does not make you their ally.

In the Weimar Republic, the Social Democrats (SPD) were the largest party as late as 1930, and had control thanks to a coalition with centrists.

In 1931, the Communists of Germany (KPD) -- who had long taken offense at the compromises of the SPD -- caucused with the Nazis to topple the Prussian government and remove the SPD from power, believing that Nazi rise would accelerate the collapse of capitalism and would trigger a "German October," a proper communist revolution that would eliminate the Nazis and solve the shortcomings of the SPD.

On April 1, 1933, the Executive Committee of the Communist International stated:

Despite the fascist terror, the revolutionary upturn in Germany will inexorably grow. The masses' defense against fascism will inexorably grow. The establishment of an openly fascist dictatorship, which has shattered every democratic illusion in the masses and is liberating the masses from the influence of the Social Democrats, is accelerating the tempo of Germany's development towards a proletarian revolution.

They were... incorrect. Their gamble cost 85 million lives, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced back to the knock-on effects of the war. Accelerationism is creating a monster to defeat an enemy you cannot, then being startled to discover you can't defeat the monster either, and then blaming your original enemy for the product of your own hubris. No matter how you justify it, no matter what issues drive you, refusing to find common ground and build coalitions against the fascists helps nobody but the fascists.