Thevenin

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is one of my favorite games of all time. It's the last isometric Zelda game, and they made it a swan song. The main quest it pretty short, but it's the sort of cozy game where doing the sidequests just feels right.

In the game, you shrink down to the size of a mouse to traverse rafters and explore tiny temples and float on lillypads. It's the sort of thing that would be no big deal in a 3D game, but is wildly ambitious in 2D. Not only do they pull it off, but they fill the environments with lush, lived-in detail that springs to life when you shrink down and look at it up close. The art style still sticks with me after 20 years.

Also, forget all the "hey, listen" stuff, your sidekick Ezlo just sasses you the entire time. It's great.

a bit melancholic sometimes

Viewer be advised: If you've ever lost someone you took for granted, or hurried through what should have been a formative time in your life instead of slowing down and appreciating it while you had it, then this show knows how to punch you in the tender bits, and it will not stop.

I cried during every one of the first four episodes.

10/10

Playing hardball.

The graphic there looks like an Embassy Suites hotel without the roof.

I'd strongly suggest a retractable canopy for the peristyle (Atrium? Courtyard?), because you basically have an enormous chimney -- on windy days, the draft pressure caused by a flue that size would threaten to break peoples' windows or suction their doors shut.

She doesn't have the bona fides for the presidency, but I'd love to see Katie Porter show up to a presidential debate carrying that whiteboard.

Disagree. Every state will characterize the violence it receives differently than the violence it enacts. Even a well-intended egalitarian state can never equivocate acts of violence against its officers with those done by its officers, because if the state fails to produce an immune response against one attack, it will soon find itself overwhelmed by more. The state has to treat vigilante justice and especially attacks against its officers as illegitimate on principle, or else it will cease to be.

States claim a monopoly on legitimate violence, and I'd even say that's what makes a state a state. If a given geographic region has a hundred different entities that can enact violence without each others' permission, you don't have a state, you have a hundred states.

You cannot ask officers of the state to equivocate violence by and against the state. That's not their job. That judgement is our job.

(You can also argue that the state shouldn't exist, but that's a different and far more interesting discussion than the one the article poses.)

But we know what it really is all about - selling more cars.

It isn't even about selling more cars at this point, it's about selling securities. Their market cap dwarfs their total sales. Their P/E ratio is 67.67x, meaning they could sell cars for 67 years and still not make as much money as their stocks are worth today.

The real product is the rising stock price. The factories are just a front.

Thanks for the analysis and insight!

I found at least one of the posts, and you're right, that's not really what impressed them. It just stuck with me because I'm a hardware girl.

I'd believe it because I remember the same being true for TikTok.

I don't have the links on me right now, but I remember clearly that when tiktok was new, engineers trying to figure out what data it collected found that the app could recognize when it was being observed, and would "rewite" itself to evade detection.

They noted that they'd never seen this outside of sophisticated malware, and doubted that a social media company had the resources to write such a program.

Supremacist worldviews are intolerant and do not deserve tolerance. The question at hand is whether or not OP's assertions of gender-based divinity are tantamount to supremacist ideology, such as when a cult leader claims their followers (or perhaps descendants of an ancient lineage) are inherently superior.

Also, OP might just be a troll. Remember attack helicopters? Same vibes here.

Good luck, and I do not envy your responsibility in moderating this thread.

There appear to be some logical leaps and conclusion-shopping going on here, so I'm going to try to identify them systematically.

Capitalization of pronouns in the English language is used to denote divinity or royalty. If I refer to Jehovah with a small-h "he," I haven't misgendered him, I have blasphemed. I don't intentionally misgender people (even fictional ones), but I regularly blaspheme gods. I'm an atheist, it's what we do.

Being a man doesn't make one part of the patriarchy and doesn't confer superiority. Being divine ipso-facto makes you superior -- both socially and inherently. As I reject the notion that some people are inherently superior to all others, I blaspheme cult leaders who claim to be gods, demigods, or incarnations thereof, and I refuse to give reverence to prophets and monarchs who claim proximity to the divine. I believe this makes the world a better, less exploitative place.

I also see capitalized pronouns used (infrequently) in BDSM. Specifically, it is how some subs refer to their doms when in some extreme forms of 24/7 power exchange relationship. That's okay, but as with other BDSM activities, power exchange never includes people who didn't consent to be part of it, and consent is never obligatory. Doms who attempt to extend their authority beyond the confines of a scene are swiftly ridiculed or ostracized for consent violation.

So for anyone to make the claim that capitalized pronouns should be respected by everyone, they must first make the case that divinity is a gender. Second, they must make the case that associating with the divine does not denote inherent superiority. Third, they must make the case that compulsory use of capitalized pronouns is not compulsory submission that would violate consent.