For clarity, when you say “anti-gun”, what is that position? Like, “average people should not have them, period”?
Not trying to knock on you - it’s that there’s so many positions which get lumped under “pro-” or “anti-”, it helps to actually understand where someone is coming from.
Yes and no. I think I was overly optimistic that people would make use of the possibilities of social media. I have thoughts on why I was mistaken, but ultimately I failed to recognize that a lot of people like their views affirmed and will seek out circles which do so.
At the same time, you’re 100% right: Companies saw an opportunity to drive engagement and reap huge profits with the teeeeensy little side effects of further siloizing viewpoints, distorting reality, and elevating the most extreme positions. It turbocharged everything awful and repeatedly turned sites into cancerous shitholes.
At one point I really, truly believed that the internet and social media would be a turning point in human interconnectivity and cultural understanding. The ability to just… talk to someone on the other side of the planet, at will? When we know that exposure to other beliefs and cultures is superb at punching holes in hatred and misunderstanding? Surely this would lead to great things!
Yeah, that was a miss.
Exposure to other is still a fantastic way to grow understanding. But the internet and social media were not a highway to it, and as the “wild west” era of the internet faded and we instead got corporate-governed, algorithm-driven siloization of views, my views on the value of social media changed sharply.
For me it’s the ‘Can you hear me now?’ animations. Every once in a while, when I see someone having issues with their phone/earbuds/whatever, those pop into my head unbidden.
Shit, that just awoke some memories in me. Back from ye olden days when people would just fire up their own website to host their stuff.
It is unacceptable that Babylon 5 is not on this list. It was rare, at the time, for shows to have a multi-season story arc with character development planned from the start. JMS got his seasons, though, and used them beautifully. Every single episode, even those that don’t contribute to the main storyline advancing, either show a character developing or build the foundations for that development.
FMA:B is up there on “shows I wish I could forget just so I can watch it for the first time again”, and so much of it has is how many characters’ final moments (re)define them. Tossup for me between:
Yeah, I 100% get where you’re coming from. (And I agree with you; the Ori seasons weren’t the strongest of SG-1. Babylon 5 had a similar problem where they wrapped up the entire show’s myth arc, only to be told there’d be a sudden fifth season. It showed.)
I think for me a lot of it depends on whether they decide to “un-conclude” the existing story or branch it off in an entirely new direction. Like, looking to Stargate again, the Ori seasons struggled, but Atlantis was a great way to propagate the concept with a new cast, characters, and story.
I’m kind of ambiguous about the first point. I think you can expand on a tightly-written, concluded story… but not repeatedly. Furthermore, it requires you to - to some degree - shift the focus of the following stories. Continuing the meta-story is all and just fine, but the immediate story can’t be about the same theme/issue/encounter indefinitely.
It’s an episode almost or entirely composed of clips from previous episodes. Usually it has some sort of a framing device - for instance, in an adventure show, it might be the characters taking a ‘breather’ after a tough encounter and musing on how they got here. Or one character might confront another about a situation that’s been brewing, and the clip show is showing bits of that situation leading up to the confrontation.
On an aside, reception to clip shows is an interesting shift. For a long time, one or two were an accepted part of a long-running series - either because it let you make an episode on the cheap using recycled footage, or because in the pre-internet-streaming-on-demand world, it let audiences catch up on what had been happening in episodes they might have missed or seen months ago.
Nowadays, however, they’re almost universally viewed negatively, as their reason for existing is absent and they’re mostly taken as a sign of poor planning by the creators.
This. It says, “I acknowledge you are upset, and accept blame.”
Civilizations are big, and people are resilient - so we rarely find things like, “This plague/volcanic eruption/extinction of a species 100% wiped out this civilization and their culture”. People tended to move away rather than just die, and their cultures tended to assimilate and combine rather than just vanish.
But there are placed where we reasonably believe that natural consequences resulted in the decline of civilizations:
The decline of the Sumerian nations is associated with increasing salinity of the fields in southern Sumeria, shifting populations north towards Akkad. I believe there’s still uncertainty over whether this was driven by Sumerian irrigation practices or some other cause, but the fact that it happened is undeniable.
The Hittite Empire was a vast prehistoric empire which collapsed as part of a period of upheaval known as the Late Bronze Age collapse. The cause of the collapse is still disputed, but it is clear that there was some environmental shift involved. Warfare, plague, and economic changes may also have contributed.
In both these cases, we have only very fragmentary remnants of the surviving culture, often filtered through the lens of subsequent civilizations’ recordings. The Hittites even were arguably “lost” for a time - until the mid-1800s, they were only known through Biblical references, rather than any relics or ruins.
For reference, the first generation of IPhone actually preceded the IPod Touch, but the Touch reached my friend group first. Thus my reaction when I first heard of the IPhone was more or less,
“The IPod Touch is a gimmick, and now they want to make it your phone? Why the hell would anyone want a touchscreen phone in your pocket? Touchscreens are finnicky at the best of times, break at the slightest provocation, and a whole computer in your pocket would cost an absolute fortune. There’s nothing wrong about just carrying an Mp3 player and phone separate in your pocket; this is just Apple selling an overpriced toy to their fanboys. Touch-screen computer-phones will never take off.”
Boy do I feel like an idiot now.
And this infuriates me because the market for those suites is so oppressively terrible.
Like, hell, I don’t even need the full suite of simulation and modeling tools that they come with. Just give me a rock-solid parametric CAD engine, a decent rendering suite tacked on to it, and I’d really love it if anyone in this market could start investigating Linux compatibility! Hell, I’d even pay for that - just not the awful licensing regimes the current offerings operate under.
Yes, unfortunately. Or at least seems to.
This person was an eye-opener for me in terms of how deep political groupthink and unquestioning belief can go. He’s an intelligent person in a highly technical position that requires plenty of reasoning and thought, but if the right political commentator says something, it is absolute truth.
The overwhelming thing I remember is a sense of “Huh, I guess this is it.”
There was a possum in the middle of a busy road, acting oddly. Walking in slow circles, pausing to stare, wandering back and forth… just generally acting odd. I was concerned it might be rabid, and nobody else had called 911 yet, so I did. Gave them the info, they connected me with the local dispatcher, and that was that. Didn’t stick around to see what happened.
When I got home I found out that Possums are almost never rabid. Poor thing had probably been hit by a car. Animal control probably would’ve been a better option, but when I’d called I was actually worried for anyone else who stumbled into it.
Bonus points if it’s, “He’s childish because he’s so emotional.”
And then we wonder why men are closed off emotionally.
Huh. Today I learned. Neat!
Many of your examples of “bad” moderation are more about site administration (including use of tech tools and appeals) than the degree of moderation. Like, yes - Reddit’s moderation ecosystem, particularly in large subreddits, is fundamentally broken. Powermods, lack of accountability, malfunctioning digital filters, mods who lack of options for alternatives (or, where those alternatives exist, they are frequently overwhelmingly cesspools)… it’s got issues. But this isn’t about “more” or “less” moderation; it’s about poorly-applied controls in the first place.
I’m not so sure Lemmy is so “perfect” either. I’ve seen plenty of moderation based on political views rather than actual misbehavior here, and conversely plenty of actual hatred and bigotry getting a pass because those in charge of a give space viewed it as aimed at the “correct” people. Likewise, while the Fediverse allegedly lets parallel communities develop, in reality it can be hard to overcome the inertia of people moving towards a popular community, unless the mods/staff there really screw up.
Okay, so what’s the actual right amount in a given community?
My admittedly cop-out answer is “That depends on the community”. There were some where extremely rigidly-enforced rules - particularly about quality or contents of answers or posts - helped to ensure communities retained a high degree of quality and reliability in what was posted. But others might want a more casual, relaxed space to goof around in - including in ways that others might not like - which require looser rules.
And that’s really the rub: There’s no absolute right answer. We can point to lots of wrong answers, but getting it right is a complex journey for each space. My personal focus is that whatever level is agreed on, it must be fairly applied for all users. You cannot be passing one user’s slipup and coming down hard another. Be fair.
…and in the end, there will be people who simply cannot follow the rules, no matter how clearly they are explained.
In 2002, there was a game called Naval Ops: Commander. It’s a warship simulator game, with the tweak that you could build your own warships out of an assortment of parts. I don’t think I’ve played it in 20ish years. Definitely more than 15.
Yeah, the Main Hangar (essentially, your ‘home screen’ once you’d selected a playthrough) Theme is on loop right now. The ending ~10 seconds of it, to be specific.