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7mo ago
I mean they're clearly wrong. The yellow smiley face came way before The Simpsons and was the basis for emoticons/smileys before they became emojis.
It would also have avoided the endless Trump lawsuits or at least most of them.
But I think it would strictly make things better because it gets Trump out of the game. The culture war is probably an endlessly rising tide but for some reason Trump makes it rise much faster whether he's winning or losing as long as he's playing people are losing their minds and justifying literally any culture war item they support or reject on the back of his uncouth facebook-level news regurgitation.
It's also worth saying that it completely evades Kamala being the candidate which, in my mind, would lessen the culture war. It would have possibly stymied the idea that "my enemies are fascist and going to disenfranchise or even destroy any minority they encounter" not because it's true or not, but because it didn't work.
Trump, for all his faults, did not decide to try to arrest Hilary. The complete disregard for law or procedure maybe came earlier but to me it seems like it was fully ignited because of January 6 and dems implicitly saying that this "insurrection" not only defines any of our enemies but also empowers us to treat them as enemies in what should be neutral situations. Trump has some classified things or not whatever but a law that nobody respected or expected would be used in this situation is somehow exceedingly important because it can be used to attack Trump.
I am becoming more and more blackpilled about this but I do think the difference between waiting for Trump to finish and vanish and just lying, throwing away decorum and meeting him far below his level because you can get away with it doesn't happen if he's elected. It would have probably ended up this way regardless but Trump makes decorum decay at warp speed.
(maybe his level is that low, I don't know, but one thing's for certain in my mind, he would be ineffectual because he mostly has been.)
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7mo ago
Emoticons perfected the usefulness of small image addendums to communication and emojis enshitified them over and over and over until we have have the dumbass garbage we have now where it wants you to put an emoji of groceries after you just wrote groceries. Though there's probably still an argument to be made that emoticons/smilies were not necessary either. There's a part of me that finds anything beyond simple ASCII smiles or winks obnoxious now. I think that stupid clapping shit with emojis between each word pushed me over the edge into hating what they've done to communication.
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8mo ago
My neighbors had a netless trampoline growing up and the kids there and a lot of the neighbors jumped on it for hours a day and I don't recall any injuries from it, but most of the falls and near injuries were from hitting the part with the covered springs.
On looking it up there are a bunch of different types of trampoline nets, some that are outside the spring portion and some that are inside the spring portion and of varying heights as well. I imagine if the net were arranged within the springs rather than outside the whole of the trampoline it'd fair much better at preventing injuries than ones that are completely outside of the trampoline because you can still fall onto the covered spring portion which was about 95% of how people fell while using the trampoline either hitting the spring portion and falling off or just hitting the springs and twisting their ankle on them.
The most common factor to people--that I can remember--getting hurt but not really injured, on the trampoline, was multiple people using it at once, though.
I don't know this all sounds like a specific bubble. Here's my personal bubble.
In 2020 I would have voted for Biden if my vote mattered but I live in California so I've always voted third party. I thought Biden would tone down the culture war and stop petty political bullshit. Didn't appear to happen at all. Kamala's campaign seems to be built on saying she's great, ridiculing and slandering anyone at all who disagrees, and both of those things coming back to "this is true because I said it's true." And to be fair it works, a bunch of idiots wandering into a building and breaking a few things is now an insurrection. And that's been so common that I've become enured to it. But the petty mean girl shit they've been doing has actively made me think I might never support the democratic party again. Coupling together the "Kamala can't possible lose and is polling ahead of Trump on all demographics" and "Yeah, but also fuck him, fuck his family, this JD Vance guy fuck him, too, fuck his family, they're all dirt and should die. Kick 'em while they're down and don't stop 'til they're dead." They're justifying this shit by saying it's Trump's weakness. Yeah, well, now you're just like Trump and you can't pretend to be the party of good vibes and higher moral character anymore except for people who don't pay attention or have no compassion for anyone who thinks differently. Being underhanded, playing dirty politics is one thing to do behind the scenes or allowing to happen hands off but this explicit endorsement of being without decorum or decency has vibed me into my vibe-shifted vibe that I can't hold onto any hope or promise because it's all tainted with being scummy.
(Note that I look at Reddit too much. This may be strongly responsible for my vibe-bubble or vibubble for the vibe enthusiasts out there. Also note, I'm not making fun of you specifically for saying vibe, but it's become almost a meme to me at this point where people just say vibe about everything, now.)
There's a scene in Good Will Hunting where Will is telling his therapist how his dad used to present him with a belt, a stick, and a wrench and make him choose with which to get beaten. He chooses the wrench because fuck him. I'm almost that bitter because of how they decided it was a good idea to sink to Trump's level of being a petty insulter. Really, below Trump imo because Trump is a liar and a blowhard and I certainly don't take his insults as the dead serious "I would murder you and it would be completely fair and right" attitude that people have about Trump.
My vote doesn't matter but I might just vote for Trump. Trump deadlocking the world because no one will ever agree with him even if he said the sky was blue sounds like a better option than having another president and cabinet that get to do insanely retarded bullshit like trying rioters as insurrectionists because they feel differently about their politics and not any of the actual intentions behind the riot itself. Trump might try to do that but the justice department will protest, sit on their hands, and nothing will happen. So, how is he not the better option, here?
I just saw a snippet of this on reddit. It's unbelievable that there wasn't anyone in Australia better. Though one of the reddit comments makes a good point that most people who are good wouldn't pass the Olympics drug test.
EDIT: here's a news story with more context and videos (though all of the videos are also on twitter they're not down right now)
Okay, the whole cast were not losers. It was an extremely unlikely kaleidoscope of friends that were and I can't believe I actually seemed to remember this offhand: band geek, jock, freak/stoner/beat?, and dudebro. But none of them were the lowest totem pole of their respective tribes and the audience was routinely shown characters more desperate, more sexually obsessed, and pathetic. You were supposed to laugh at Jim when he fucked the pie, but it all came back to understanding the power and desperation of puberty and sexual conquest. That most notable scene is followed by Eugene Levy talking to his son about like he's a human being that's done something that shouldn't be done but not something that he himself doesn't understand the desire to do especially at that age.
In the same vein as every other time I've heard of people making macguyver'd sex toys and, yes, other time's I've heard people talk about fucking couches, it's ridiculous and desperate and they know they're being laughed at by sharing it but at no point have I heard someone say it isn't true to the human experience. It's intrinsic weirdness relies on relating to others about your masturbation habits.
Look at it this way, is a foot fetish weird? I expect everyone has a fetish of some sort but having that isn't the weird part. Telling other people about it notably weird. Making said fetish your only avenue for sexual gratification is weird. Someone being super excited by feet and like licking them or whatever before sex is kinda like "Ah, okay, I see you, now. I know what you like." And not, oh my god this person is a pervert beyond the pale. Whereas if that same person goes onto some onlyfans model's insta feed and posts "show feet." that's really weird, even in the sphere of already being fallen into sexual deviance because of how it reflects other issues that are far weirder than the foot fetish and that is a lack of shame, and a lack of boundaries or to a lesser extent compartmentalization.
In the context of an autobiographical book fucking a couch is on the same level as discussing masturbation candidly but the abstraction of it being "for" something matters. Context always matters and affects what makes something weird or not. Almost all the stories I heard about men fucking inanimate objects were from people who had moved past that stage in their life and were relating how utterly impactful and intractable their libidos were as young men. If they were talking about it while they were still doing it that's an entirely different ball of wax but again I think context matters. In the context of an autobiographical book that I assume includes the pain and awkwardness of growing up it seems perfectly in keeping of something I'd expect of a teenager in the 1990s-2000s based on what I've heard from other people about the same thing.
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9mo ago
I've heard this from the radio, comedy specials, podcasts, youtube videos, and men posting about it on forums. I used to listen to Loveline every night and it seems to me it's as common or less common than a woman using a vegetable as a makeshift dildo, certainly not beyond the pale.
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9mo ago
Believe? I guess. I've heard from many men talking about experiences like this that it seems very normal to do from like 12-16 but not normal to talk about. I suppose it becomes less normal the older you get but I don't know how old Vance is supposed to have been in the fake excerpt. And I suppose it is "incel energy" but I don't think that that is altogether weird. Most men when they're younger are incels. It's really only weird to be an incel if you're like mid 20s and above. I can't really speak to how "neckbeardy" American Pie is but I really think that's a reach, unless we're just calling anything that's lowbrow neckbeardy, now.
(Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what neckbeardy means but to me that codes as autistic and much more concerned with fantasy/sci-fi and in-universe lore being consistent with source material. Though, like incel, neckbeard has never been clear as an insult for anything other than this person believes differently than me and this makes them bad human beings. incel being you are like this but can't have sex and neckbeard basically being you are like this but also ugly and being ugly is a bridge too far. Similar to cuck in that it feels like more of an insult that's trying to make friends with other insulters rather than actually make an accurate insult. Which, I guess, weird falls into now.)
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9mo ago
I can see that. I keep thinking about undecideds and middle America I completely forgot that most people simply don't vote and democrats have a bigger base.
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9mo ago
But I'm not sure whose vote your getting with the attack though. Is the game making republicans mad so they lash out? In my mind the undecideds are more likely to be offended by the trend than to internalize that republicans are weird and thus not worth voting for because I don't think weird works as an insult for the outsider looking in. It's just too tepid.
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9mo ago
It's odd to me because it seems like such a bad attack. The idea of a young man fucking anything and everything inanimate is not weird. I've heard many comedians or just "funny guys" on podcasts/standup talk about this all the time and they always get laughs. Hell, American Pie's main character fucked a pie and it was simply a joke and I don't recall any big hubub about Jim's character being too weird because he fucked a pie. Though that was a long time ago, I don't remember American Pie showing up as one of those movies that you "forgot" was bad because it fell outside the overton window now. When I saw that Walz used it as an insult I honestly just felt secondhand embarrassment.
The whole "weird" angle of attack seems really bad in general because it doesn't say what they want it to say. If they want to tar Vance for something made up just say he molested someone. If they want to tar republicans for being gross then call them gross, as an insult for anything against the left-leaning the word is already used that way anyway. Weird just doesn't work in my opinion. Comes out somewhere along the lines of calling an old man lame. Yeah, maybe the old man is lame, so what? The word is not insulting enough. Most people probably identify as weird in some way when they're probably not weird at all but since it's not really a pejorative and was in fact celebratory in most cases before this sudden shift. Hell, most of these people probably worship Weird Al and their favorite Radiohead song is Creep, hey there's another better word than weird.
But I feel like the way that the astroturfing is turned up to 11 right now there's a feedback loop going on where it's nearly impossible to tell if a strategy is working or if everyone's just nodding and agreeing with the strategy because, to me, the crux of it all working is getting the majority of people to say that it's working.
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9mo ago
All the extensions that I saw that said they did this are defunct now. There's a program for doing it but it sounds like more of a hassle than it's worth if this is happening all the time.
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9mo ago
Yeah, I said it was like over half the reports in the janitor queue. We disagreed on how often the reports were "super downvotes" for being too left or too right.
I understand them well enough, now. You can just call me stupid and not be passive aggressive about it, I'm an adult.
I would have no problem with him being banned if the person that instigated the events were even just warned but they weren't in this case or in the others. The rules are different for each poster. Wildcard rule, whatever. I disagree that this is a good way to do things but I stand by the fact that it's simply unfair for seemingly no reason other than accumulation. In most situations the instigator is held to a higher standard than the responder. But not here. It's fair and right that there should be consequences and even if you had given steve a permanent ban but had given the original instigation a warning I would have thought it was a better response than just ignoring someone basically calling anyone who makes a certain argument a pedophile and not even getting an informal warning.
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9mo ago
The fact that you think the world operates on the same level with the same understanding for all people is ridiculous. I saw a clear insult receive no warning and you get to say it's not an insult and to not believe my lying eyes because the person who insulted back got some warnings earlier. I accept I don't see everything but I see what I can see, I didn't see most of the warnings that netstack brought up in the other post but I stand by what I've said. You enforce the rules haphazardly and based on divination that's impossible to understand from the outside looking in and then say everything is completely transparent expecting everyone to know everyone else's posting history by default. In most of those examples his seething is preceded by someone needling him and arguing in bad faith that does not get a warning or anything at all. The fact that you can just say "no," and then say you're the arbiter of reality is honestly breathtaking in its rudeness and smugness.
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9mo ago
So exhibits a, b, c, are warnings that were not warned or bans that didn't happen? How is it consistent to hold those posts against him if they apparently didn't break the rules? Is it not exactly like I said that those posts are part of a debt that leads to a ban that neither he nor anyone else is aware of?
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9mo ago
I'll have to take your word for it as it's all I have, but, like a certain New York City rental bike situation, I know that you and I see the world in different colors.
Anyway, if you want users to not post in a certain way then warning them privately is a pretty bad way of getting other users to know what's okay to post. I've never gotten a private warning but I've read many posts from SteveKirk in the past weeks and months and I'm sure there are some that got warnings I didn't see but this ban is the only one that points out to others that it's not an okay way to post. "Accumulating a record" that no one can see, and only the person who has the record knows that and only then they get to know only by accumulation doesn't seem transparent at all. Not for others or even the person with the record. Especially because "having a record" is the A.#1 reason why anyone gets banned on this site.
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9mo ago
This is just pointless. Why is someone getting banned for doing the exact same thing that a poster did above them but the above poster doesn't even get a warning?
The mod queue being how we decide if someone gets banned is just dumb. I check the user/janitor thing every time I'm here and it's like half of the reported comments (which I assume is how they get there) is because someone disagreed with them and they're using the report as an extra downvote. And it's obvious that is skews in one political direction as well, maybe because they're a smaller portion of the people here or maybe it's just their way because it certainly is on places like reddit. But using that as an excuse is surely just going to end up with people deciding the only way to decide what is acceptable on the site is just mass reporting everything they disagree with.
I still don't understand why the mods here can't ever ban people for the things they do that are bad but instead keep a secret tally of bad things that they don't disclose and then ban them for all those things when they do something less egregious. And almost always in a baited argument where the person doing the baiting does not even get a warning.
I can't verify this will solve your problems but I use a firefox extension called imagemax url that i guess was intended to find the largest image size but it actually goes through these things that obfuscate the image link so you can just right click and download the image once you click on the extension (it's just a selection in the right click context menu). It's definitely handy for the new annoying trend of making things undownloadable.
firefox extension link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-max-url/?src=external-rfaq
script link: https://openuserjs.org/scripts/qsniyg/Image_Max_URL
EDIT: Also, some images that have been fucked for me with bad headers or whatever, where they won't open in my image viewer or Photoshop, I can open them in paint and just save them again and it has made them usable for me after doing so.
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9mo ago
Thank you. I wonder if not having a direct competitor at this point is having an effect in any way. Much the same as "generic democrat" or "generic republican" can probably beat any specific democrat or republican. I think until he gets into a debate or does like a 60 minutes interview most of this is prognosticating without enough information. Palin not being able to name books or supreme court decisions is a kind of gaff/failure that moves the needle in my mind and as long as Vance can come across as even slightly intelligent he won't be impactful to the election. The fact that they're going so hard and so constantly against him with so little means, in my mind, they don't have much to tar him with. I am surprised they seem to have him out there appealing to the base though, maybe they needed to appeal to republicans more than independents.
Maybe his freshness or even appeal to republicans is a reason to pick him, but maybe it's just that Trump can stand him and considering the volatility of trying to get a VP that might publicly disagree with Trump and get Trump to start huffing and puffing at his own party it might be better to pick an "unlikable toady" than someone who might cause Trump to gaffe himself out of the election. It heads off Trump tripping over himself down the line. Who knows what strategy was put into the choice or if there wasn't any at all, really. Trump feels like a black box that you can't mess with if you want it to perform, if he decides it's JD Vance, then just let it be and try to make best of what you have.
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9mo ago
The ad actually strikes me as too jokey to be effective. But maybe it doesn't hit close enough to home for me to understand why it would be effective or offensive in either direction. It just seems like a standard current year SNL skit in that it's not really funny but you can tell it's trying to be and mostly aiming for some agreement claps.
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9mo ago
Could you link to those polls? How much of that factual point is democrats responding to the polls? It would not surprise me at all if the polling was far more partisan than when Palin ran and democrats answering presidential polls are probably skewed far more negative nowadays toward republican candidates regardless of who that candidate actually is. I don't think people during the McCain campaign era would be grousing that an assassination attempt against him failed. I think even discounting McCain being an outlier where democrats could like him that kind of opposition party respect just does not exist anymore. Trump is literally Hitler. Vance what's-his-name is VP, well then he's Hitler, too. Not even saying it doesn't work both ways but I'd bet that favorability does not matter unless someone is undecided anymore because anyone who's of the opposite party is going to be as negative as it can get.
I genuinely think it would make little difference who Trump picked. There would be wild and constant hysterics about anyone. Some of it would be mitigated if the person had more experience or was a more palatable gender or race but they'd still be ground into dust by the media machine just like Palin was and Vance is getting done. If Vance's childless cat-lady quote can be so easily taken out of context and create an entire personality for people to hate then anyone who has any public statements in the past is going to get the same treatment.
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9mo ago
In a similar vein, Carmen Mola didn't exist and was the pen name for three men and it was only revealed when they won a prize and went to claim it.
Do you watch tennis? I'll admit I haven't watched in years, but Hawk-Eye/Shot Spot was unchallengeable and considered the final and correct call. Tennis has been much better ever since it was introduced. It's extremely fast, replaying shot location in less than a minute (sometimes even less than thirty seconds) of the challenge and showing it to the player. It quelled people stewing over something they thought might be a bad call and kept the game moving. I'd thought for years that if they introduced a system like this for baseball then it would speed up play considerably and mollify people's questioning of whether an umpire's call was correct. I'm sure it'd need to be more fiddly because of changing strike zones but I suspect they really don't want to introduce something that would speed up play in baseball anyway.
The only problem I see with this is that letting a player ask to see where the ball was probably helped ease tensions a lot during matches and the challenge, even if just confirming what the computer already saw should probably still be included as a request if it's just using a similar system to Hawk-Eye/Shot Spot.
This is exactly the kind of stupid-easy thing that AI should be used for. Did something pass this plane, yes/no? There's a world of difference between that and deciding something like a complex criminal court case.
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