This looks fun until you picture goblins riding velociraptors. Then it’s !!FUN!!.

My favs change constantly so I’ll list a lot of songs. I’ll also include lyrics with EN translations because it’s useful for language learners.

• [English] Pink Floyd - Shine on You Crazy Diamond (lyrics)
• [English] José Feliciano, Ewan McGregor & Jacek Koman - El Tango de Roxanne (lyrics)
• [French] Cœur de Pirate - Comme des Enfants (lyrics)
• [French] Edith Piaf - Non, Je ne Regrette Rien (lyrics)
• [German] Faun - Tanz mit Mir (lyrics)
• [German] Rammstein - Spring (lyrics)
• [Italian] Giorgio Gaber - Il Dilemma (lyrics)
• [Italian] Renato Russo - Strani Amori (lyrics)
• [Japanese] 梶芽衣子 KAJI Meiko - 悲しくないからふしあわせ Kanashikunaikara fushi awase (lyrics)
• [Japanese] Creepy Nuts - Mirage (lyrics)
• [Latin] 野間久美子 NOMA Kumiko - Lilium (lyrics)
• [Polish] Kayah and Bregović - To nie Ptak (lyrics)
• [Portuguese] Engenheiros do Hawaii - Herdeiro da Pampa Pobre (lyrics)
• [Portuguese] Nenhum de Nós - Camila, Camila (lyrics)
• [Spanish] Mecano - Hijo de la Luna (lyrics)
• [Spanish] Carlos Gardel - Por una Cabeza (lyrics)

Note: I’m listing the versions I like the best, not necessarily the originals. And in two cases (Strani Amori and Lilium) they are not sung by native speakers.

It’s a bit of idealism from my part, but I’m hoping way more than just forcing us (people in general) to stop being online: I want to see all this crap backfiring and prompting the formation of a parallel internet. One that is user-friendly, but corporation-hostile, even at the expense of small convenient bits. Mostly from parts of the “old internet” being glued together: the Gemini protocol, the Fediverse, TOR, etc.

I don’t think the point is to leave the bots out. It looks more like grabbing even more info about you, because you can know a lot about the person just telling them to wave their hand on a cam:

• sex, gender, skin colour, age
• do they have calluses? This hints profession
• do they bite the nails, leave them to grow too much, or carefully trim them? This hints psychological factors
• what’s on the background? Even a blank background hints the person is a bit more privacy-conscious.
• etc.

It was discovered that inexperienced developers with no marketing budget, who likely turned to AI simply because of a lack of other resources, saw hardly any negative impact on sales despite the AI disclosure. These games were almost certainly going to struggle even without the use of AI.

It’s a different story for the more established studios with an existing following and previous titles. Game Oracle found that the use of AI by these studios resulted in a significant 40% to 60% drop in sales.

This actually makes sense. People are willing to turn a blind eye to more and larger flaws in a game if they know it comes from a small indie developer with barely any experience, than if it’s coming from a well-established studio.

The matter here is what players noticed, and avoid. I see three possibilities:

1. people checking for AI disclosures, and avoiding games with them;
2. AI output being slop and making a subpar game, something along the lines of Burton’s suggestion;
3. the sort of dev who uses AI is likely to make crappy games, even without it.

#1 is irrationally brushed off by the author, but I think you should gather data before brushing off hypotheses like this. #2 and #3 are lumped together in Burton’s “advice” (that boils down to “if people complain about you adding shit to your sandwich, add a bit less, also if you’re pouring shit in the sandwich odds are the meat is rotten too”), but they’re two different beasts — one is about the tech yielding a worse product, and the other about the developers themselves being bad.

Perfect analogy.

I think your first interpretation was more accurate. Otherwise Maoism wouldn’t make sense, it isn’t similar to social democrats or to Trotskyism.

I’m probably the worst person to talk about this, given Bakunin influenced my political view by a lot, but I think even this tendency can be explained by the role of the vanguard. Something like this:

• Trotskyists — you need someone to lead people
• Stalinists, Dengists, Maoists, etc. — yup, you need someone to lead people
• Anarchists — nope, don’t bring this shit here, it’ll become a new tool for oppression

I’m oversimplifying it, I know. [And to be frank it has been a long time since I read either theory or history regarding communism.] But note how this creates a situation where Trotskyists end siding with other Marxist-Leninists, but always trying to “pull” that vanguard to a different direction than the rest, creating internal disputes in that vanguard and claims we’re trying to fuck everything up.

Trotskyism is still a Marxist-Leninist ideology, and defends the formation of a vanguard party to lead the revolution. In that specific aspect it is not different from, say, Stalinism or Maoism.

While Left-Communism either rejects Leninism (but follows Marxism) or claim the current ML ideologies promote yet another bureaucratic rule, instead of proletarian rule. And it’s extremely suspicious of any sort of “headed” organisation; as exemplified by Rühle’s The Revolution Is Not A Party Affair.

Personal comment, as a Trotskyist: it’s mostly a difference in the structure being proposed. That does matter but the goal is still the same, so I certainly don’t hate them. It’s just they (and the Anarchists!) are worried the structures I find useful might bite us back, and it did happen once, so their worries aren’t unfounded.

You say it’s “the most obvious read” and yet the other poster still missed it. They weren’t pushing that point back; they were pouring random trivia, as if it was pushing it back.

That’s why I mocked the “ackshyually”. Could I rephrase the quoted point another way? Yes. Will I? No. I think this behaviour should be ridiculed, it adds no relevant content to a discussion. Ackshyuallies, sealions, why do we [social media users] even entertain this sort of thing?

And tone won’t change content in this case. “Teaching you to run into machine fire” has a negative tone but there’s nothing wrong with it. Call it “brave souls laughing at the face of death” (positive tone), or “suicidal butchers going Lemming style, WAH-HOO!” (way more negative), the point still stands: an institution is able to train people to disregard one of their most basic instincts to do its [the institution’s] bidding, that is bloody scary.

EDIT: plus the “what is it that disturbs you”. It shows willingness to make shit up about things one cannot reasonably know; it’s a waste of time to discuss with people like this, because once you brush off their assumption they’ll pour another, and another, and another.

Cat agrees with bunny:

It’s about teaching people to disregard their own self-preservation, when following orders. That’s why they say “it scares me”.

It doesn’t need to be machine gun firing (part for the whole; “dangers in general”); or literally running towards it (hyperbole; “risking to get harmed”).

You might agree with their point, or disagree with it. However, “le ackshyually to le narwhal bacon’s knee, you’re instructed to take cover lol EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD KIND STRANGER!!!” doesn’t address what they said at all. And, like, people get rubbed off the wrong way when others use those “ackshyually”.

Sorry for the uncalled advice but it’s usually a waste of time to discuss with people who go out of their way to treat a figure of speech as literal, and vomit a huge “ackshyually” about it. Or that lie / assume / bullshit about your emotional state. (Cue to “what is it that disturbs you?”)

Because, like, it’s plain obvious your “run toward a firing machine gun” is a figure of speech.

I’ve been picking a few Hikaru no Go episodes to rewatch. Not the whole thing, just some fun games.

That series brings me memories of my chess club times. And internet cafés.

Nope. Still loafing around:

I often heard something similar, in spirit. Roughly translated: “if you aren’t a commie when you’re 20, then you’re heartless; but if you’re still a commie when you’re 40, then you’re brainless.”

I’m 40 this year. Still a communist. I guess that makes me brainless?

Days without Meta violating basic principles of honesty, dignity, and decency: zero.
Days without Meta reverting harmful decisions only because people outraged at it: zero.

(And no, neither counter is broken. They don’t reach one… because.)

See, there’s stuff that’s clearly wrong, like:

• Paraguayans drinking it too cold
• folks in northern Paraná drinking it too hot
• Argentinians roasting it too much, until it’s brown
• Riograndenses milling it too thin

But canned yerba? That isn’t just wrong, it’s abomination! Refer to Dante’s Inferno: the 8th circle is for the fraudsters who put cheese on garlic-and-oil pasta and ketchup on pizza, but the 9th one is for the ones who drink canned yerba! It’s treason!!!1one

(I think it should be clear for anyone I’m joking with the fake outrage. Specially given I quite like tereré, i.e. Paraguayan style cold yerba. And unlike Che I’m not some boomer to tell others to stop enjoying what they enjoy. But seriously, I bet he’d be mad at the canned yerba. And most other things in the meme.)

Anyway, it isn’t just about the caffeine content, it’s all that nice ritual and the flavour and everything else.

I think this doesn’t have to do with the writing system, but with how heavily a culture relies on context to convey meaning. In general, East Asian cultures do it way more than the ones from Western Europe and the Americas, so Japanese/Mandarin/Korean/etc. speakers are way more likely to omit contextually clear words than German/English/French/etc. speakers. And if the translator is inexperienced they might try to translate the sentences word-by-word, or even get the context wrong, and in both cases you’ll get issues.

EDIT: crafted a cute example based on… well, weeb knowledge. Consider the following situations.

1. Your friend stumbled and fell down, and you’re worried they might have hurt themself.
2. You stumbled and fell down. You didn’t hurt yourself, but a friend is worried you did.

Your typical English speaker would answer #1 with “are you alright?” and #2 with “I’m alright.” Or similar. They might perhaps clip the verb from #1, or replace “alright” with “okay” from either, but the subject will be always there.

And yet that’s exactly what Japanese does with “大丈夫” daijōbu. Sure, you could phrase it as a question in #1, like “大丈夫ですか。” daijōbu desu ka?, but for most part you don’t need to; and you’re certainly not including the pronoun, it’s kind of obvious that the word refers to whoever fell down.

Now. Imagine you’re translating that “大丈夫” into English. A noob translator might translate it with “alright”… and it gets hella confusing — what is supposed to be alright? Or they might pick the context wrong, and translate it as “I’m alright” when it’s supposed to be “are you alright?” or vice versa.

Except Japanese won’t do this just with the pronoun, or the “hey, this is a question!” mark. It’ll do it pretty much all the time — why two words, one enough?

It’s not just uncensored loli porn. It got censored in the LN from spy cam footage of his niece in the shower (the main reason why his brother gets so violent).

[Rudeus on Sylphy and Roxy]

The anime and WN are a bit more explicit on that, but even the LN is crystal clear on Rudeus being a paedophile. And I think the folks doing mental gymnastics to claim otherwise also lack basic media literacy, just like I criticised the “third way” ones.

In the meantime I find your “option 3.5” fairly reasonable. It’s completely fine to criticise the work for not doing a good job of calling out shitty behaviour, specially in the light of its theme.

Rudeus does mention once that Paul (isekai father) is scum, and that’s why they understand each other, but… that’s it. In the meantime Paul cheats on Zenith (who’s monogamous) with Lilia (who’s employed by Paul, so Paul is in a position of power over her), and gets away with it.

I’ve also seen an interesting discussion about how much of the author’s personality is reflected in their works.

It’s somewhat clear for me that Magonote doesn’t really care too much about social causes, such as the role of women in society. And that he caves in to readers’ pressure a bit too easily. But past that, I don’t know, really.