domain:questioner.substack.com
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
11m ago
I think what bothers me is it feels like more and more companies are using inject racial poltiics into otherwise crappily designed media in order to blunt all legitimate criticism because then all criticism can be tarred as racists.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
22m ago
I went to college in Montana. One of the professors noted that a local baker owned their own farms for quality reasons. At first the farms were operating at a loss, but they preferred the consistency of the wheat that came from vertical integration. As the bread brand grew so did the farm. The farm turned profitable at about 10,000 acres (4000 ha). I would guess most of their competitors were at least 1 order of magnitutde smaller. The college town and climate probably wouldn't support very high-priced organic produce farms (it'd be cheaper to fly in produce from those farms in a warmer state).
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
25m ago
I know people who regularly get offered a Tesla "upgrade", both on Hertz and Avis.
I noticed this while renting a car for a group trip recently, that it was cheaper to get the electric vehicles in comparable price ranges than the internal combustion engine vehicles. I can only imagine what unholy set of federal subsidies are encouraging this behavior from rental companies.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
30m ago
...assassin's creed series includes other widely disputed historical claims like Benjamin Franklin's possession of a magical golden apple.
Ah, yes, the old pretending to be retarded style of counterargument. I notice this often enough that I started bookmarking examples that I meant to get around to writing up, but it still surprises me when I bump into examples of people that appear to just obviously putting on a show of acting like they're confused about something that's simple and obvious to anyone involved. No one is objecting to Assassin's Creed being fantastical and taking a bunch of poetic license with the source material and content from history. I've played exactly one Assassin's Creed game and included the cinematically awesome leap of faith mechanic - your character, dressed in aesthetic white robes, can climb to incredibly high perches above cities and dive off, covering tons of terrain in a majestic swan-dive before plopping safely into a stack of hay. Helpfully, some physics students ran some quick math on this and concluded that diving a couple hundred feet into a shallow bed of straw will probably kill you.
Of course, this didn't really bother anyone even though there probably weren't very many Arab assassins diving off of mosques into shallow beds of straw. Why not? Because it's awesome. It looks cool, it's a fun mechanic, and it's memorable. People weren't bothered by Ben Franklin having a magical golden apple because it just sounds incredibly fun in the context of America's founding. You know what else is fun and awesome? Samurai and ninja assassins in medieval Japan. Super awesome and super cool, something that much pretty much every male grows up thinking is super awesome and super cool. So, naturally, fans of the game are excited to play out one of the classic settings for awesome sword-play.
You know what's not awesome? Injecting your stupid racial politics into 16th century Japan and then hiding behind "actually, there was a black samurai, and you weren't even upset about a golden apple, so I've gotcha you racist". Furthermore, when someone does that, you can probably rest assured that they're not all that invested in making the game awesome, so it raises your hackles in expectation that you're dealing with people that are more interested in pissing off putative racists than actually making a game cool. Maybe the game will be good and maybe it won't, but pretending to be retarded when having the argument isn't likely to convince anyone.
MollieTheMare
37m ago
I assume someone else will be able to answer your specific questions better than me. My general impression is that with the federal tax credit they are fine. Especially as a second car for the household. Also, especially if you have garage parking where installing a charger will be easy. The tires are expensive, but it's more than offset by the cheaper fueling cost. People report mixed experiences with Autopilot, it's pretty good in easy conditions, but does get confused sometimes, with some notable crashes by drivers who overestimated its abilities. I guess Elon throttling you is fine, as long as he doesn't decide to have your car drive you into a jersey barrier.
If you travel a bunch of on business and are signed up for your companies preferred vendor rewards program, it should be doable to arrange for one as a rental on your next trip. I know people who regularly get offered a Tesla "upgrade", both on Hertz and Avis. You can also rent them at somewhat reasonable rates if you are flexible with the date and a little lucky, if you want an extended test drive.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
40m ago
Do you mean like adding a badge or icon displayed under the post?
2D3D
42m ago
This is just another instance of reputation laundering of black people by hollywood, although remarkably incompetently executed in this case. Having Yasuke be a secret Assassin mission giver/NPC makes way more sense than having him be an actual stealth assassin type. Only way that would work is if they made him the ninja and let his black skin work with the noh stagehand outfit for perfect night stealth, but that is too daring for even Ubisofts modern retardation. Having a fucking samurai in full yoroi somehow be an assassin, and leaving yasuke unmasked to emphasize his blackness has to be deliberate incompetence at this point.
In the end, hollywood and its adjacents keep making the same mistake: inserting black people into cool shit doesnt make black people cool, it makes that cool shit just shit. They fucked up with Cleopatra, they fucked up with Lord Of The Rings, and they'll fuck it up with Yasuke.
Christ, they can't even commit to doing something when a black man doing cool shit really happened. What the fuck happened to adaptations of Alexandre Dumas dad, or the awesome life of Haile Selassi. The list is not exhaustive or long but surely it is better than enshittifying established cultural properties just to please some click-starved journalist doomscrolling twitter.
2D3D
56m ago
I think it is also fair to see which immigrants come to london to be treated as londe oners, as opposed to immigrants who wish londoners to treat them as migrants deserving entitlements.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FstMoM-spJU&pp=ygUeZ29vZG5lc3MgZ3JhY2lvdXMgbWUgcm9iaW5zb25z
Given the chance, some migrants would wish to remove themselves from the cultures they left behind, save for food. That they often give up midway and revert to cultural kins is a function of task difficulty on both ends of the equation rather than lack of desire. Sunak and Sajid Javid and the rotterdam mayor can make a reasonable claim to wanting to be part of the new society they found themselves in, compared to the islamists that refuse to even learn english.
In a more formulaic and low stakes corner of the culture War Ubisoft has announced "assassin's creed Shadow". The series is known for offering open world exploration set in various historical locations and times from the Nordic to ancient Egypt. This installment is appearantly a popular fan request in being set in fuedal Japan.
The culture War angle is that the game has two main characters, a female assassin and a disputed historical black warrior named yasuke. Now I haven't played one of these games in over a decade and am not particularly invested in this title but the response has been a fairly clean case study in marketing by controversy and I think it might be worth dissecting.
In my corner of the web I first learned of the game's existence from the preemptive "man, racists right wingers are going to hate this" posts. And indeed if one looked it was not hard to soon after find right winger racists filling their niche in this tired dance. One can always find bad takes that isn't what is interesting about how this kind of thing develops.
A trap seemed to be set, I don't know which end first broached the topic of "historical accuracy" but because it took the form of what legitimate criticism might look like the culture War quickly fell into a groove of progressives defending the historical existence of yasuke being a real samurai and pointing to other popular media depictions of him as well as pointing out that the assassin's creed series includes other widely disputed historical claims like Benjamin Franklin's possession of a magical golden apple. The anti-progressive backlash is in a hard place because I think there is something legitimate there but the shape of the discussion is not condusive to making the argument.
I think most of the anti-progressive front probably doesn't have an issue with a black sumurai in a game made by people they trust to have making awesome games as their first master. There's something itching in the back of the head of the backlash crowd that the reason we have yasuke isn't because a black guy in Japan makes for interesting segments of blending into crowds but because the people making the game have an anti-majoritarian view. The same thing that gave us yasuke is what motivates someone to put on a "fuck white people" shirt.
This is a feature of the culture War I'm seeing more and more. Proxy battles that few people care deeply about but have features that make them better or worse to do battle on. This game seems like favorable terrain from the woke angle and it's tempting to just give them it but I understand the impulse to fight on the terrain anyways.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
1hr ago
Did you end up watching the series? How did you find it?
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
Yeah. Even my previous, smaller house, had a next door neighbor with a lot of "advice". Two retirees with a cumulative 100 hours a week more free time than the young couple they were advising.
No_one
1hr ago
I'm not. Once went on a hot/not site and got a rating of precisely 5/10 from girls. I certainly don't look like any of these stereotypically 'handsome' guys of present day like e.g. George here, or Lomez (the recently outed 'far-right' Jew ).
Looked up my face on image search, a very close match is this guy:
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
A couple folks are suggesting "let it go". I get it! But a few things:
- If you lived in my neighborhood you'd be pretty reluctant to be the guy who replaced everything with a bunch of concrete padding and cut down all the trees in your yard. Standards are high - yes the boomers are at another level with their yards, but other young families are handling their shit. Mine's a bit tougher than some others unfortunately. Frankly I'm already embarrassed with how much I've let it fall off!
- The yard's a significant store of value. I suspect it cost 6 figures or more to get to this point - there are many places that can't host grass due to elevation changes + shade (where the mulch goes) and it's clear an expert designed the whole thing. If I let it go to seed it'll cost me some $ on sale.
I think the trick is going to be me just holding on for dear life, making more money somehow, and getting it right the next time.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
We're already there.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1hr ago
On the Fourth of July, I run in American flag shorts while listening to Rick Derringer's Real American.
But seriously, I just lack any meaningful ties to an ancestry or heritage other than American. I have British ancestors that got here 400 years ago and German ancestors that started coming in the 1800s, but pretty much none of them in the 20th century seemed to have done much to maintain any ties to the old countries. We're just a very American family and I'm good with that.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
An example that immediately came to mind was Mindy Kaling's first role being writing and portraying Kelly Kapoor as a narcissist, egoist idiot mess.
2rafa
1hr ago
Rather Sunak than Jeremy Corbyn, surely? I see (and would largely agree with) your position, but for Indians especially their political distribution does not appear substantially different than that of natives, and it’s telling that in recent years (as usual) it was the ethnics in the Tory party who wanted to clamp down on immigration while the native wets were largely reticent.
2rafa
1hr ago
The church is certainly still against both gay marriage and abortion, nevertheless the official position is still more conciliatory on many of these social issues than US tradcaths are happy with.
RegularlyExpressed
1hr ago
Sure, I get you. My objection would be that I don't think it's fair to group Sunak with people like Yousef, Khan, Varadkar etc. But that's a relatively minor disagreement.
2rafa
1hr ago
If you bang one guy for 10 years during your twenties, while a loser male has one or two hookups but otherwise remains single and technically sexless for 8/10 of those years he still has an equal or higher body count to the woman. In this way measuring promiscuity by sexual partner count in the last year doesn’t make sense.
No_one
1hr ago
Same is thought to be true in Arab countries. They like large butts at least.
Interestingly, and this is something I'd research if I ever got better executive function, fatness might have been seen as sexually attractive in the eastern med area between at least 1000 to 1900. There's complaints of imams dated to cca 1200 that 'rich Egyptian women eat bread after dinner to get fatter, and some are so fat they pray sitting down, not kneeling'.
Two Czechs went on a car ride in 1932 to Kandahar, through Turkey. It's an interesting book- interior of Turkey was basically middle ages still, they went in a sports, not all-terrain car. However, they mention approvingly, as an aside, that fatness was just coming out of vogue in coastal Turkish cities. ???
Also heard from a friendly jewish extremists that he talks to bedouins in his area and they seem to like the 'mattress' body type - large & soft and less likely to wander around.
Folamh3
1hr ago
Terrorist bombing campaigns were more a feature of the Troubles than of the War of Independence. The IRA of the era largely favoured guerrilla warfare tactics, in which their combatants (in plain clothes) would assassinate a police officer or British spy and then melt into the crowds. In the Wikipedia article about the War of Independence, the word "bomb" only appears five times, one of which in reference to a Loyalist bombing attack and another to a planned bombing campaign on the British mainland which was never actually carried out. I'm not aware of a single instance of the IRA using any of Hamas's more unsavoury tactics (e.g. child suicide bombers, planting bombs with the deliberate intention of causing mass civilian casualties) during the War of Independence.
There's zero evidence that Yasuke was either a samurai or an assassin.
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