I’ve held off rewatching Rogue One until Andor season two finishes, so the former isn’t fresh in my mind, but there is plenty of character development in Andor. He’s the “guy who gets shit done” but at the beginning of the show, he’s reckless and only in it for himself. In that season he sees first hand how the evils of the Empire affect his life, recognizes how his selfishness negatively impacts those around him, sees what it means to be part of something bigger than yourself, and is able to (sort of) move on from a life that revolves around his missing sister. The Rebellion gives him something to focus on and be apart of.

The ending of episode 6, exactly halfway through the season, is also a perfect midpoint for this arc. He’s approached by somebody that’s in it for themselves, and the reckless, reactive part of Andor reflexively shoots him. He’s refuting the selfish part of himself that would have done the very same thing, but the reckless “shoot first think later” part of him is still alive and well.

is all knowledge based on faith

It’s based on assumption, not faith. If we can trust our senses, and if things will continue to be as they have been, then the things we are learning have value. As long as you can recognize that everything could in theory end or completely change at any moment, it’s not blind belief.

Nobody wants a burger that’s one 1/8th pound patty and 3 inches worth of solid lettuce.

Had regulars when I worked fast food that would order the kid size burger with a fuckton of lettuce and tomato. Just way too much.

Supposedly, a meltdown at sea is pretty low risk because you have the perfect heatsink literally everywhere around you, and its a molten salt design, which I think(?) (source: my ass) means that the fuel would at worst leak into the sea and immediately solidify back into some inert state.

deleted by creator

I don’t plan on staying here if you defederate with Threads, but I respect your right to do it. The move seems unnecessarily reactionary and premature. I think the open web has more to gain from encouraging companies to invest in ActivityPub than it does siloing itself off from anyone who represents real growth in the space.

If you want the community to remain small, fair enough. I believe in a world in which every social media service is using ActivityPub; I don’t care what or who they are. I don’t even really understand what the anti-EEE crowd is afraid of? The protocol is run by a neutral party (W3C), I can’t imagine any features that would compel major change, nobody that’s already on the Fediverse is going to leave, you can always decide later to defederate… The system already seems pretty well protected against hostile action.

No

Doesn’t really seem spoilery to me at all. Alan Wake - and Remedy in general - is very into surreal weirdness and world fuckery. He’s mostly talking about audiences being receptive to pushing creative boundaries.

This does not apply when you can move or make your own instance. It’s like complaining about tyranny inside your own house. Like, what?

I think a perfectly acceptable line to draw is “Is it reasonable to expect a large majority of the people on this instance would want this other instance blocked?” If the answer is yes, block them. If somebody has a problem with that, move to a different instance.

I don’t really understand what the problem is.

I would just write the world in a way that is interesting to you, and add to it as players show interest. “Hey, I want to play a Tabaxi” -> “oh okay, let me think about what that means and I’ll get back to you.” This also gives you more latitude for using their ideas to inform the world. “I want to play a Tabaxi Wizard” -> “oh interesting, maybe there’s a clan of them that…”

You’ll be able to focus on what you care about, which will make the world more interesting, and allow players to incorporate things they care about if they wish, which will make it more fun for them too. Framing it in terms of “up for deletion” implies you need to answer everything about the world from the start, which is not only inefficient but an impossible standard. Just because you haven’t considered something doesn’t mean it can’t exist.

I added that to sort of admit my own hypocrisy; I tried to exaggerate my opinion a bit for the sake of spurring discussion. I mostly believe what I said, but my real thoughts are much messier and less well thought out.

Many Marvel films, for example, are actually competently written plot wise. I also believe lots of them have basically no value.

Gonna try to phrase this an inflammatory way:

People who like bad movies have been conditioned by consumerism to not appreciate art. They believe spectacle, humour, and a tight plot are ‘good enough’, and they don’t value thoughtfulness, novelty, beauty, or abrasiveness nearly enough. Film is more than a way to fill time and have fun. Film is more than an explosion, a laugh, and a happy ending.

On an unrelated note: Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my favourite movies.

“Instances” at the bottom of the page will take you to a list of, I believe, federated instances, and at the very bottom, blocked instances.

The left doesn’t want free speech.

You’ve placed the bar so low that this suggests there is nothing an individual person can say or do that would warrant being banned, which is frankly bullshit. Every forum has rules, including this one, as it should. This is critical for maintaining a place of a discussion that is actually useful. I see no reason why “yeah but they’re popular” should give license to skirt the rules.

Freedom of speech, in the US at least, exists specifically to prevent the state from restricting speech. That’s all it is, and all it needs to be. Banning users from a private website does not contradict this.

The suggestion that unbanning Alex Jones makes the service less susceptible to ‘ignorant propaganda’ is also laughable.

I think you’ve correctly identified a problem, but misidentified the solution.

It’s true that there are many redundant communities of which everyone would be better served if there were an easy way to group them together. The solution, however, is not to reduce the number of instances, but rather to provide more tools for instances to group communities together. You want communities to be spread across many instances because this maximizes user control - it’s kind of the entire point? But of course, the lack of grouping makes it very difficult to try to centralize discussion, which is important for the community to grow. This service is still a work in progress, so these kinds of things - I hope - will come in time, as both the technology and culture develops.

tl;dr: centralized control bad, centralized discussion good, the current system does a bad job of reconciling these two positions

If you want, you can view science as a system of organization. A way of making sense of facts. If I give you a file of seemingly random ones and zeroes, it is useless. If I give you an algorithm to decode those ones and zeroes into a message, that has utility. However, somebody else could produce an algorithm to decode those same ones and zeroes into an entirely different message. So, which algorithm is correct? Neither.

But say I give you another file, and Algorithm B doesn’t produce anything useful for this message, so now Algorithm A is more useful. But I also provide a new Algorithm C which also finds messages in both files. Now which is more correct, A or C? And on and on. We continue to refine our models of the data, and we hope that those models will have predictive utility until proven otherwise, but it is always possible (in fact, almost guaranteed) that there is a model of the universe that is more accurate than the one we have.

Consider the utility of a map. A map is an obviously useful thing, but it is also incomplete. A perfect map, a “true” map, would perfectly reproduce every single minute detail of the thing it is mapping. But to do so, it would need to be built at the same scale as the thing it is mapping, which would be far too cumbersome to actually use as, you know, a map. So, we abstract details to identify patterns to maximize utility. Science, likewise, is a tool of prediction, which is useful, but is also not true, because our model of the universe can never be complete.

I don’t really know what this post is on about, but science is not truth. It’s a system of prediction. The closest you can get to “truth” would be observation and data. Science is the process of interpreting these facts to better understand what things will look like in the future. It is obvious that science is not ‘true’, because by its nature it requires change over time as our models of the world improve.

My hot take is that you don’t actually want fewer streamers. As it stands, pirates benefit the most from content wars because the services are paying more to produce shows than they are receiving in subscriptions.

The obvious losses are legacy content and access to it. I don’t know that there’s a good solution. A streaming service benefits most from surfacing content that will keep you on the platform, meaning either a modern series with promised future seasons, or older content that’s still popular. Any old obscure media is going to lose money for rights holders on a $/stream deal because they could potentially make more $ from a single physical media sale than any amount of streaming would net them (if it’s $/stream, and only 2 people stream it, that’s very little return). And nobody subscribing to these services is going to shell out more money for specific titles because to them, that’s why they’re subscribing in the first place.