thawed_caveman

Here's the thing that makes Minecraft's world so much more dangerous: we have life-threatening creatures in the real world too, but they are living creatures bound to the laws of ecology; if you build a city without large herbivores, you can be sure that this city won't have tigers in it, because they need those to live. A tiger would need to physically walk from the forest to the city, with ample opportunity of getting spotted. Hell, killing the last tiger is a safe way to never have to worry about them again, since they need to reproduce sexually, and if there are no tigers left in an area then no new ones will appear out of nowhere.

Minecraft creatures, meanwhile, do appear out of nowhere. It doesn't matter if you've depleted the world of every last zombie, new ones can spawn absolutely anywhere, even within the safest possible area, all it takes is a small corner of mild darkness. Or does it? Because i've had random mobs spawn in extremely well-lit built environments where i was convinced they couldn't.

Minecraft's creatures cannot be definitively excluded from an area, nowhere is really safe beyond doubt even if the place is built entirely out of light-emitting blocks.

Then again, people do live in areas with venomous snakes and scorpions, those have a similar "potentially anywhere" threat as Minecraft mobs, yet people seem fine. They don't live in fear all the time. Then again again, snakes and scorpions are passive and only attack if you make physical contact with them, whereas Minecraft mobs actively look for you.

So yeah, nowhere is truly safe in Minecraft, there's genuinely always a possibility that you'll need to defend yourself from some horror.

The word

dumb

is almost perfectly symmetrical, at least d and b are, and i really like it. Depends on the typeface of course.

You can have a perfectly symmetrical set of letters by writing "dunb" but that's not a word

Love that Firefox highlights this cursed domain name

Right so i didn't know exactly when a candidate has to be 35 (at time of nomination, election day, investiture...); if it's investiture then an AOC candidature is technically possible, though i think we'd have heard about it by now if she had that intention

Replacing Biden was always a good idea, and the opposition always had the argument of "Biden is unfit for the presidency yet is still being pushed by his party, therefore the Democratic party is dumb"; but now prominent Democrats have (correctly in my opinion) called for Biden to be replaced. So there's no going back now. If they don't, the oppisition now has an even stronger argument: "Biden is unfit for the presidency, members of his own party have called for his replacement, yet he hasn't been replaced, therefore the Democratic party is really dumb".

Finding a candidate that energizes voters and creates a big turnout is hard, but not impossible, the 2020 primaries have minted several candidates and raised their profile.

Funnily enough, AOC turns 35 this October, she's too young by like a few months if i get this right?

You are technically correct. I should have said physical media

I really like the comparison of analog media with camping!

Since owning a CD player i use my CDs more now than i did in 2010. Unfortunately Discogs shipping fees mean i can't buy most of the things i want

It's not even a matter of bullying: NFTs disappeared because they were fundamentally not viable, and there's a good chance that generative AI is also not viable.

Generating an output is extremely computationally expensive, which is a problem because you need several attempts to get an acceptable output (at least in terms of images). This service can't stay free or cheap forever, and once it starts being expensive, that's also a problem in itself since generative AI is most suited to generate large amounts of low-profit content.

For example, earlier this month, Deviantart highlighted a creator that they claimed to be one of their highest earners; they made $25k "in less than a year", which is not much for the highest earner, and they did it by posting over NINE THOUSAND images in that time. They were selling exlusives for less than $10.

The only way this makes sense is if it's really cheap to generate that many images. Even a moderate price, multiplied by 9000, multiplied by the number of attempts each time, would have destroyed their already middling profit.

Ironically, i feel like you're putting too much emotional stock in what it means to vote. You're not cheering at the person, you're not signaling as a fan of theirs, you're not even actually giving them approval in a way that matters; all you're doing is influencing the course of which party gains power, and in this case it makes a significant difference.

Some people can't affort another Trump presidency. People of color and LGBT and homeless people in many states (i guess every state?) would suffer the consequences a lot more than you and me, whereas the consequences of a second democratic term (Biden or otherwise) are a lot more nuanced. The differences between a republican or democrat administration sure matter to them, and our ideological purity does not.

We have a mechanism to put bad people in power instead of the worst, this is a meaningful difference, all it costs is some personal discomfort, and it does not replace whatever else you're doing in terms of activism. You can do both.

I don't understand how people use the For You feed and still stay on Twitter.

My approach to Twitter is the same as every other social media: follow accounts that i'm interested in and browse the Follows feed in chronological order, completely ignoring algo recommendations. So i'm counting on accounts i follow to either post goot stuff or retweet it, which they do. They also retweet crap sometimes, but not nearly as much as i would get in For You.

Ok well if there's a lesser evil then that's a settled question, you vote for the lesser evil. This is the sad reality of electoral politics.

Electoral politics can't advance the causes we care about, but they can prevent the worst case scenario, which is absolutely worth it and we have a moral duty to do it.