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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I am returning to Hollow Knight thanks to the Silksong hype. I had dropped it before because I was unsure where I needed to go to progress and was getting sick of running around the map trying to figure out which paths were actually available to me and which needed some equipment I didn’t have. Well, I did figure it out and basically have everything important unlocked so now I am enjoying it again.

    If you do pick it up again, I have some advice. First, there’s a relic in an area called the Hive that will give you passive health regen if there’s a long enough gap between instances of damage. This means you can keep messing up a platforming section and as long as you don’t rush it you can heal back after messing up without needing new sources of soul. Second, there are some sections that are traversable with minimal equipment but become trivial with more. Deepnest was really annoying to me when I went through it and I frankly would have probably enjoyed it if I had one really helpful item unlocked (or even just a bit more health). Third, don’t worry too much about money. Normal enemies don’t give you much from farming and I think I’ve run out of stuff to spend it on mostly from other sources. So don’t be afraid to let it go. If you’ve unlocked the fast travel thing, just head back to vendors when you’ve noticed you accumulated a decent amount.

    Like I said, I’m enjoying the game again after years away, but I really wish they had a better way of letting you know where you should go next and what isn’t available to you. Needing to go through zones again to check if something is now unlocked or not is tiresome. The pins help but they are not enough, and I didn’t think to reserve certain colors for certain types of obstacles the first time.


  • It depends on what you mean by current spending. I’m putting almost a third of my pre-tax income into savings already. If you mean I can live off of 65% of my default post-tax salary, sure. That probably wouldn’t change too much from my current expenses, and I would love the free time. If you mean 65% of what’s left over after my normal contributions, then that would be pretty tough. I consider my current lifestyle to be relatively frugal, so that would be very hard.

    I’m actually trying to achieve the FIRE lifestyle, so the goal is getting to the point where average post-tax returns on investments is at least annual expenses. But I can’t do it by thirty.



  • You’re getting downvoted, but this is literally the positive use case for it. I don’t buy new games much, but when I do I “pre-order” the day before so I can download it early and get whatever other incentives there are. Reviewers getting early copies means you can have everything you reasonably need to know to make an informed decision about whether a game is worth buying.

    It’s of course true that they can change the game between the early copies and release, but then having it downloaded early also means you can refund it sooner if necessary and get on with your life. Some games rely more on multiplayer or live service, but those are the sorts of games it’s worth waiting for community feedback after release anyway.


  • I think this is the right explanation, assuming the story is true. Dry noodles expand when put in hot water, and I would think that includes gastric acids in the human body. The boy started having symptoms in half an hour and died soon after. That’s too fast for something like food poisoning, and they didn’t find anything wrong with the noodles being sold. So it sounds like pressure buildup from them expanding inside him caused damage.

    OP, I would be careful not to eat too much at once, and eat slowly. The boy ate three packets at once. Maybe eat some other stuff with it so the noodles can’t build up a large mass of just noodles.



  • For Mario and Peach, Nintendo has had decades to do something and hasn’t. They officially confirmed they’re just friends I believe.

    For Kingdom Hearts, it’s a similar thing with Sora and Kairi. There are some undertones and potentially attraction but they’re just friends, and children besides. They haven’t done so much as kiss. Plus with Birth by Sleep it’s shown that Sora literally has had another dude inside him for years.




  • Thank you for the link and context. I’m not familiar with most of what you brought up, but I’ll check it out.

    Hasan Piker is a socialist as far as I can tell so I guess they would be to the right of him. I hadn’t heard of Francesca Fiorentini.

    I think I remember them talking briefly about a “birth giving person” label but they didn’t seem to treat it like a big issue at the time. They may have focussed on it more some other time and I just didn’t see.

    One thing I do remember is when Cenk caused a stir as a guest at a TPUSA conference a few years back and focussed on common ground ideas like oppression from elites and disdain for legacy media and certain politicians, some on the left but also a lot for Mitch McConnell. If that’s what friendship means then I don’t have a problem with it I guess. He seemed consistent then with what he’s been saying now.

    I guess another thing recently was praising Marjorie Taylor Greene for proposing cutting back on funding for Israeli missiles. Regardless of the background of the person launching it, the bill was a step in the right direction for them so they gave credit. Again, I would say it’s consistent with their values rather than it being a partisan thing. They are definitely not fans of hers.

    A big part of avoiding echo chambers is holding people on your side accountable and examining perspectives from people who disagree with you. The criticism I’ve seen so far focuses on the actions that violate their stances and acknowledges counterarguments so I consider it generally fair.


  • I must be missing something. I have been watching TYT recently after being impressed with Cenk’s arguments in his appearance on Jubilee. Regarding American politics, he is certainly left. Maybe people on Lemmy think otherwise because we have so many literal Communists, but in their videos they take every opportunity to rant against the “donor class” while criticising Republicans for obvious reasons and Democrats for being pro-Israel, their election shenanigans, or for generally not being radical enough.

    The only politicians I’ve seen get much praise when I watch are Bernie and Zohran Mamdani, so that’s about where I would put them. If you don’t consider Social Democrats / Democratic Socialists to be left, I am curious where you think the centrist “origin point” of the political compass should be. I would think their policies would be left of the governments of almost any country on Earth.



  • I also read it. Saying it writes it off might be a slight overstatement, but it doesn’t accept trauma as valid justification for not doing something you are otherwise capable of. It generally treats it as a comforting lie to avoid recognizing something one doesn’t want to confront about oneself.

    That is its most controversial claim, and with our modern understanding of things like PTSD it would certainly need to at least yield a lot of ground. I also remember it advised parents to not really praise or scold children in a way that passed authoritative judgement. Even as someone who thinks parents should generally trust kids to make their own choices more, that seems hard in practice and not likely to benefit a child depending on feedback from parents.

    But I would still recommend it with the caveat that you are free to disagree with any of its claims. It’s overall very empowering and pushes the idea that someone’s worth is not dependent on the evaluation of others. It tries to convince the reader that they are capable of changing things they don’t like about themself rather than being deterministically fated to it like Freud might have you believe. With the amount of hopelessness people face now, it’s probably more relevant today than during Adler’s life.


  • The NYT has also published many pieces demonizing Palestinians and downplaying Israeli war crimes. It even helped Israeli intelligence assets spread allegations about sexual violence on October 7 that couldn’t be verified by other Journalists, human rights groups or the UN, but helped strongly in distracting from well documented and evidenced sexual violence by Israelis against Palestinians they have taken hostage.

    I’m not sure what you are trying to say with “couldn’t be verified by other journalists”. The specific event discussed at the start of that section concerns an alleged rape that was not witnessed by a NYT reporter presonally. The evidence for it wasn’t believed by some of her family, at least initially. That unfortunately seems fairly common for rape victims. Other descriptions about what happened that day were also from witness testimony, so it makes sense that details would disagree. It’s expected to be fairly unreliable as evidence, but not to the extent it shouldn’t be reported on.

    Do you consider reports of sexual violence to be Israeli propaganda? Because while Hamas has denied that its fighters committed any sexual assaults, the UN has reported there was “a pattern indicative of sexual violence by Palestinian forces during the attack”. The unverified part of the claim by Israel is not that it happened, but whether it was actually ordered by Hamas rather than just being opportunistic individuals. For the record, the UN has similarly reported Israeli forces doing the same to Palestinians with at least implicit encouragement from leadership following Oct. 7.







  • It’s annoying that people are downvoting you just for asking an honest question. I think the anti-ai sentiment is strong enough that in many communities, people just oppose it in any context. The arguments I usually see against using ai are:

    1. It takes business away from actual human artists
    2. It takes a lot of energy, thereby contributing to climate change
    3. It is a privacy concern

    All are real concerns, but I agree that making memes should be an effectively harmless use of it even if you otherwise oppose it. 1 and 3 aren’t really applicable to your average meme. 2 could apply depending on how you measure it, but most of the cost of ai is from training, not generation. For someone using the tool and not developing it, that training is a sunk cost they are not responsible for. I’ve seen estimates that you can generate about 9 images with the energy it takes to fully charge a phone. I think that’s more than worth it if you share it with a few other people to enjoy.