You must not be that interested in staying in contact with your family if you’re only willing to use one, specific way to do it and simply refuse to use any other method.

How about texting? Does texting work?

Amazon has become an expensive version of Wish.com.

Maybe use “sucks”?

“Sucks” has homophobic/misogynist roots, though, and they’re much more recent than the ableist usage of “lame”. Even the 1950’s version of “sucks eggs” wasn’t actually talking about the things that come from a chicken.

Even the people who seem to be in favor of it all seem to be talking about how they’ll write going forward.

With that said, editing older works to fit different contexts isn’t new at all. I remember reading my grandmother’s collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and cable companies routinely overdub curse words in movies and cut out sex scenes. Different edits for different audiences. It’s weird (it’s not weird) how we only start getting pissy about it when it comes to editing out slurs and stuff.

I don’t think anyone’s arguing for completely banning books that use shitty stereotypes and nasty racial language. The “unabridged” versions, much like the “theatrical releases” of movies, aren’t being thrown into a giant shredder. If someone wants to read an anti-semetic rant by Dahl, it’s out there. But we’ve never once at any point in the past gave two shits about editing content to make different editions for different people, and I haven’t heard an argument about why we should care when it comes to this specific version of the practice.

If North Korea wants us to know something different, they could tell us themselves. Or, even better, let the people talk to foreign journalists without handlers and threats of repercussions.

Otherwise, we’re forced to wonder about how weird it is that it seems like every news organization in the world is dead-set on spreading lies about this one, tiny, geopolitically insignificant country (and no, being able to launch toy rockets into the ocean once every couple of years does not make them geopolitically significant). Like, why did the BBC and RFA and Reuters and the AP and Al Jazeera all get together in a dark, smoky room and cook up a conspiracy to defame North Korea, of all countries? Why not, say, Thailand, or Malaysia, or Morocco, or something?

If this is true, then another danger is it (community, server, platform, etc) becomes an echo chamber.

There’s a middle ground between being an “echo chamber” and being forced to put up with the same 10 different bad-faith bumper-sticker sealion questions over and over again for all eternity.

I come to Beehaw when I’m just dead-dog tired of having the same arguments over and over again, when I’m sick to death of hearing what the alt-right thinks about any given issue, when I’m just fed up having to defend my identity and my beliefs from crypto-facists who think they’re being subtle when they imply I shouldn’t exist and wouldn’t exist if they had their way.

I know what “the other side” thinks. Dear God, I can’t escape hearing what “the other side” thinks, about everything from the international politics of war to beer cans. I’m well aware of the “discussion” they want to have, I’ve had it eighty thousand times over the course of my life and it’s always the same theme and the same tactics lightly reskinned for whatever outrage bait they read about on Facebook last week.

For example, their opinion on “kids getting trans surgery” is exactly the same pile of nonsense as their opinion on “partial-birth abortion” was 25 years ago: “We’re going to take an extreme situation, that almost never actually happens precisely because of how extreme it is, that only ever takes place after months or years of agonizing decision-making between parents and entire teams of professionals with advanced degrees and decades of experience, and pretend like it’s the primary form of this issue and happens on a whim.”

I’m over 40. I’ve heard it all. I know what their opinions are. Fuck, I know what their opinions will be on shit that hasn’t even come up yet, because it never changes. They never shut up about their opinions. So no, I’m not worried about getting into an “echo chamber”. I like finally having a little bit of soundproofing between me and the “(allegedly) silent majority”.

Right? Where has this article been? They’ve been denying it since the 80s.

Over the entire course of my life, the New York Times has never once been on the right side of an issue the first time. They only come around 5-15 years after the obvious public sea change. Same with the Washington Post.

That’s exactly the kind of information I was looking for. Thank you!

That’s an amazing idea! Thank you!

The Arkansans have figured out a way around the new no-porn law.

This guy obnoxiouses.

Wait, no, that’s not right.

Uh, instructions unclear, dick stuck in Reddit? How’s that?

Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin

There’s a third one I didn’t know about?

That’s gonna be the one to take off. Put your chips on Firefish. It’s always the one I’m not using.

There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest. It’s easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on “All/Active” or “All/Hot”, frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.

Nobody. They are the Supreme Guardian Council, which is why I will only ever refer to the so-called “chief justice” as “Ayatollah Roberts”.

Because most of us consider the idea that Hillary Clinton is a world-class assassin who never leaves a shred of evidence behind to be a hilarious and absurd concept.

Nobody mentioned the smell? Holy shit, that sounds like the setup to an awful prank.

The smell is an intense sensory experience. We had ferrets for a few years, and at no point did I ever go nose-blind to them. They are the stinkiest things anyone otherwise sane has ever willingly let into their home. Cleaning their litter boxes practically requires a respirator. And that’s after their musk glands have been removed (which, at the time, was standard practice; you couldn’t hardly get ferrets from anywhere with their musk glands intact).

They’re fuckin’ adorable, and playful, and fun, but man, the smell. All the other problems with them being only-just-barely-domesticated wild animals aside, the smell is probably the most important thing to know about them.

My ex had two sun conures.

The thing I would like people to know is that they make the kind of noise that will literally drive you insane if your brain doesn’t adapt to tune it out. It’s loud, high-pitched, and constant.

It’s not about just making phone calls difficult or making it hard to hear what your friends are saying (especially if the parrots decided they hate your friend, which is a whole 'nother parrot problem). It’s so pervasive that it actively changes how your senses perceive your environment.

Years after they both died (at about 20 years old, the female died from getting eggbound and the male died of a broken heart soon after), my brain was still putting parrot noises into the background sounds of my house. I’d be doing my normal daily thing, then stop and be like “Wait, why have I been listening to parrots screeching for the past two hours? They’ve been dead for three years” and my brain would go “Oops, sorry,” and I’d stop hearing it for a while.

I’m guessing they will try to solve this issue with some cheap human labour to review what is being generated.

They already do. These current "AI"s are starting to look more and more like Mechanical Turks, except with a couple hundred third-world wage-slaves inside the box.

Most literate tankie