vaguerant

joined 9 months ago
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She was a good girl. in c/dogs@lemmy.world
[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 27 points 20 hours ago

Thank you for loving her.

Man Afraid to Ride Subway Named Head of NASA in c/politics@lemmy.world
[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 6 points 2 days ago

In fairness, space is as far away from the subway as anybody's ever been.

MAGA and Epstein in c/politicalmemes@lemmy.ca
[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 29 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I feel a thousand years old. People are mixing up George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the TV series Avatar.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Earth has been split into three large superstates: Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia. These three states are in perpetual war with one another, with Oceania's alliances frequently shifting so that the current enemy and ally could change at any given moment and history is rewritten to affirm that the enemy and ally had always been in their present alignment.

Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs—all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.

Nineteen Eighty-Four spoilersIt's entirely unclear whether the information above is factual within the reality of the novel. Whether the three states exist at all, whether they are at war, etc. is impossible to know because all information is managed by the Party. This could simply be another part of the propaganda machine. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter if any evidence contrary to the Party's currently approved history has been memory-holed.

"There is no war in Ba Sing Se" is the Avatar line, while "Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" is generally the line that gets quoted from Ninteen Eighty-Four in similar contexts.

Its so easy for humans to die from a random accident, but very hard to deliberately end their own lives reliably and painlessly. in c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 40 points 3 days ago

These seem like arbitrary rules. Most random accidents don't reliably kill people and are also painful. You're comparing a tiny subset of random accidents to all intentional suicide methods as if they are or should be somehow similar.

Far-right conspiracy theories spread online in aftermath of the Texas floods in c/politics@lemmy.world
[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 1 points 3 days ago

♫ I still dream of QAnon ♫

(To the tune of Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting".)

Rat King in c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 39 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Sorry if I'm misreading, but I wonder if you're mixing up Steve Bannon (71) and Barron Trump (19). The Tweet says "Bannon" and is probably meant to imply the former. Steve Bannon is probably too old to have ever been victimized by Jeffrey Epstein; they are/were the same age.

New gender neutral toilet just dropped in c/okmatewanker@feddit.uk
They deffo don't in c/witchesvspatriarchy@lemmy.ca
[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 146 points 5 days ago (23 children)

Sorry to go all Godwin's law, but astrology can and has been used as a tool of oppression. Nazi Germany had a state-sponsored astrologer, Karl Ernst Krafft, appointed by Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess and Chief Propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Krafft was employed to write astrological propaganda that justified anti-semitism on the basis of celestial events. He was also tasked with using astrological observations to predict threats to the Führer Adolf Hitler and offer military advice.

Ultimately, it's not the stars and Moon that do the oppression, just whoever is in charge of divining their meaning, which is also pretty much how religious oppression works.

Retrospective Discussion | Doctor Who (2005) | 1x05 "World War Three" in c/doctorwho@startrek.website
[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 3 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Mildly amusing: watching the "previously on Doctor Who" I could tell pretty much when I tuned out of the previous episode. At some point, I switched to scrolling through my phone while listening to the episode. It was really only the final scene with the electricity effects, which is decent considering how much I didn't like the last one.

Farting aside, the comedy is improved here. "I think you'll find the Prime Minister is an alien in disguise ... That's never gonna work, is it?" Elsewhere, the good to bad ratio is just a lot better than the first half. Jackie always adds some heart and Harriet Jones gets to do more than hide in closets and grimace about farts. She's a likeable character whose solid introduction sadly wasn't really capitalized on given future timeline changes. The Doctor's memory of her ("Elected for three successive terms. The architect of Britain's Golden Age.") is much better than what he ends up doing to her Prime Ministership.

We get some additional mentions of how young Rose is, which always kind of throws me. Billie Piper of 2005 is already into her second career and has been a public figure for seven years. Her music career started when she was just 15 and ended at 18, so even though she's already been retired for five years, she's still only 23. Still, she's not entirely believable as a 19-year-old, which is probably for the best given she ends up with a significantly older man.

The absolutely-no-budget alien explosion is very fun: the cutaway and throwing blobs of practical guts around feels like something out of Red Dwarf. It looks as obviously cheap as it is and that makes it timeless, because it looked like that from day 1. Contrast that with the CGI which must have looked a lot less pokey to viewers 20 years ago.

I would still download a car if I could. 🚗 in c/technology@lemmy.zip
[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 5 points 1 week ago

I'm not even really trying to scold folks who pirate, I do it too, I just don't bother to grandstand about it. BFD I'm pirating 30 year old video games. Y'all think if I bought a 200 dollar used one on Ebay the original studio sees a dime of it? C'mon now.

Right here is where you're essentially in agreement with the meme. You recognize that walking into a used game store and shoplifting their copy of the game is objectively worse than downloading an additional copy of the game, where you haven't harmed somebody else to get yours.

I don't think the argument is that "Piracy is completely and entirely victimless in all cases," but that it's a false equivalency to equate piracy with theft. They're not the same thing, is all.

🏆100 Highest-Rated TV Shows (Based on Aggregated Data) in c/television@piefed.social
[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 16 points 1 week ago

Certainly, but I don't know how to tie those back to a Batman '66 reference.

Evolving to Fly (2016-09-02) in c/pbf@discuss.online
[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 7 points 1 week ago

It's true, I've seen Jeff Goldblum do it.

16
Orphan Black: Do the characters get any easier to like after season 1? (spoilers) (fedia.io)
 

I know I'm very far behind, but I just finished season 1 of Orphan Black. It's clearly good and I like large parts of it, but several of the main characters are written to be kind of awful people, in-universe. I don't know how much I'd enjoy watching a show where I don't like about 30% of the characters.

Obviously, Helena is super broken from a terrible upbringing and to some extent can't be blamed for her unconscionable actions, most egregiously the murder of her surrogate mother, Amelia. But I've seen TV shows before and it's pretty clear that she's going to be redeemed in "future" seasons. I guess some of this will involve reckoning with her actions in season 1, but you know ... as of right now, she sucks.

Then, Alison basically murdered her best friend by watching her get strangled by the garbage disposal. There's mitigating factors in that Alison sincerely believed Aynsley was monitoring her, etc., but ultimately she just let her die because she was kind of nosy and mean. That also sucks.

Throw in Art the corrupt cop, who seems like he's going to become an important ally of the team, and these unlikeable people are really starting to add up. It might just be 2025-ray-vision making corrupt cops who cover for other corrupt cops less appealing as protagonists, but oof, that's not such a fun time.

Also, just about everybody's sexual dynamics in the show are sketchy as hell. I'll spoiler this part because it's about sexual assault.

tw: saIs everybody in this fucking show raping somebody? Most of the sexual relationships depicted are between people who are lying about their real identities. Paul and Beth, "Beth" (Sarah) and Paul, Delphine "Beraud" (Cormier) and Cosima, Donnie and Alison. Some of this is 2025-ray-vision again, but there's a hell of a lot of rape by deception going on here and I really don't like it.

I understand that these characters are clearly supposed to be morally grey at best, but right now I just actively dislike a lot of them. Maybe they really turn it around, or maybe you're just supposed to dislike them, I don't know. But I'm not eager to start on season 2 and spend more time with these people who all suck.

133
Watch Peter Dutton lose his seat, live (www.abc.net.au)
 

A few days ago, we saw Canada's Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre lose an election and his own seat. Can we make that twice in a week?

Current numbers (6.1% counted) have a 5.1% swing to the ALP, resulting in a 6.8% lead for Labor's Ali France over Liberal leader Peter Dutton.

124
Liberal Bruce Fanjoy topples Pierre Poilievre in Carleton | CBC News (www.cbc.ca)
 

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is projected to lose his longtime rural Ottawa seat to Liberal Bruce Fanjoy.

19
Suffering from minor party confusion? Some links I found helpful (fedia.io)
 

Hey auspol. It's about that time again: you know, the one where you have to sit around researching about 15 minor parties that sound distantly familiar to figure out what to put as your bottom preferences.

This year I found my way to a couple of blogs which offer brief and unabashedly biased reviews of the minor parties in the federal landscape. These are not new, I'm just late.

Both blogs are written from a relatively progressive-left perspective, at least by Australian standards. Inside the spoiler below is what they say about themselves:

Summaries of bloggersBlatantly Partisan Party Reviews

I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of a political party. I review from the perspective of a small-g green democratic socialist. I am trained and work as a political historian of Australia and New Zealand. This background guides my reviews, which originated as—and remain—notes to inform my own vote. I do not aim for any false neutrality or objectivity, and I share these remarks in the hope they are useful to others trying to navigate Australia’s plethora of micro-parties. It should be obvious but these are my personal opinions, which should not be construed as representing the views of my employer nor of any other organisation with which I am affiliated.

Something for Cate

I’m Maz. In no particular order I’m left of centre, a grandparent, a writer, trans, pansexual, a mental health lived experience worker, agnostic, supportive of unions, and supporter of the Arts. I’m committed to holding governments and media accountable and, while I can’t promise complete objectivity, I can promise to deliver the same treatment to every party and independent in this election.

I’m Loki. I’ve been in several political parties and never found one left enough for my liking. I’m a bisexual cis male, and likewise agnostic, pro-Union and pro-arts. I try not to approach anything uncritically, whether I agree with it or not. I firmly believe that objectivity is a goal that can be striven for but never actually reached. That said, in that quest I will seek, strive and not yield.

While I obviously recommend you come to your own conclusions about the parties, it can be nice to hear what other voters think of them, especially when it's some shit you never heard of before.

Something for Cate especially includes coverage of unregistered groupings, which are a deep black box of nothing to me most of the time.

28
What's your read on Milchick and Kier's comedy routine in the S2 finale? (fedia.io)
 

Spoilers, obviously.

In the finale, we get the back and forth comedy argument between Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) and an animatronic Kier Eagan (voice of Marc Geller, animatronics by Ben Stiller).

I'll quote the exchange below:

Kier: Hail your earthbound steward, your very own flooooooooooor manager!

[audience cheering]

Milchick: Thank you, Kier! And may I say, you're looking very handsome, sir.

Kier: Thank you. I'd say the same of you, if not for my favorite core principle.

Milchick: Probity?

Kier: No ... Vision!

[audience laughter]

Milchick: Well, it's truly special to host a man so illustrious, so sapient, so magnanimous--

Kier: My, you're verbose. Good thing you didn't write the first appendix. It would have burst!

[audience laughter, Milchick visibly discomfited]

Milchick: It's an honor to receive your barbs, Mr. Eagan. The legacy you've left behind is truly and irrefutably larger than life.

Kier: You mean my company?

Milchick: (coldly) No. I mean this wax statue that's five inches taller than you actually were.

[audience chuckles, awkward silence]

Kier: (darkly) Thank you for that feedback, Seth.

Milchick: Thank you, Kier.

This is clearly a prepared routine. It has setups and punchlines and Milchick is visibly reading most of his lines from note cards. However, the performance obviously goes some way off the rails in the back half.

Who wrote this routine? Who performed Kier's lines in-universe? Has Milchick rehearsed this routine or does he only know his own note cards? Is Milchick's height roast part of the script or improvised?

I'll post my thoughts in a separate comment.

16
Severance Aftershow: Season 2 finale explained by Dichen Lachman, Tramell Tillman & more (www.youtube.com)
 

The title undersells it a bit, they also got Jen Tullock (Devon) and Gwendoline Christie (Lorne from Mammalians Nurturable). Weird to hear Dichen Lachman's natural Australian accent.

TV Insider has been running a Severance Aftershow on YouTube for all of season 2. Full playlist

23
A look at Firefox forks - LWN (lwn.net)
 

By Joe Brockmeier
March 4, 2025

Mozilla's actions have been rubbing many Firefox fans the wrong way as of late, and inspiring them to look for alternatives. There are many choices for users who are looking for a browser that isn't part of the Chrome monoculture but is full-featured and suitable for day-to-day use. For those who are willing to stay in the Firefox "family" there are a number of good options that have taken vastly different approaches. This includes GNU IceCat, Floorp, LibreWolf, and Zen.

If you're interested, you should read the whole article, but below are the summaries of the four tested browsers.

IceCat is probably a good choice for folks who are more concerned with the free software ethos and privacy than with functionality.

Overall, Floorp is an interesting project with some nice enhancements to the Firefox UI. However, the development roadmap seems a bit more haphazard than I would like—switching back and forth between Firefox rapid release and ESRs, for example. That may not dissuade other folks, though.

For the most part, users would be hard-pressed to spot many differences between LibreWolf and Firefox at first (or second) glance, so a screen shot of LibreWolf seemed a bit unnecessary. That approach is likely to appeal to many users who are uneasy with things like telemetry and Pocket, but don't want an entirely new browsing experience.

Currently, Zen isn't fully baked enough for me to consider switching to it. Others may be more adventurous in their browsing habits than I am, though. I can say that it has stabilized significantly since I first tried it shortly after its first public release. The project does bear keeping an eye on, and the Mozilla folks could do worse than to copy some of the ideas (and code) that the project is experimenting with.

16
A look at Firefox forks - LWN (lwn.net)
 

By Joe Brockmeier
March 4, 2025

Mozilla's actions have been rubbing many Firefox fans the wrong way as of late, and inspiring them to look for alternatives. There are many choices for users who are looking for a browser that isn't part of the Chrome monoculture but is full-featured and suitable for day-to-day use. For those who are willing to stay in the Firefox "family" there are a number of good options that have taken vastly different approaches. This includes GNU IceCat, Floorp, LibreWolf, and Zen.

If you're interested, you should read the whole article, but below are the summaries of the four tested browsers.

IceCat is probably a good choice for folks who are more concerned with the free software ethos and privacy than with functionality.

Overall, Floorp is an interesting project with some nice enhancements to the Firefox UI. However, the development roadmap seems a bit more haphazard than I would like—switching back and forth between Firefox rapid release and ESRs, for example. That may not dissuade other folks, though.

For the most part, users would be hard-pressed to spot many differences between LibreWolf and Firefox at first (or second) glance, so a screen shot of LibreWolf seemed a bit unnecessary. That approach is likely to appeal to many users who are uneasy with things like telemetry and Pocket, but don't want an entirely new browsing experience.

Currently, Zen isn't fully baked enough for me to consider switching to it. Others may be more adventurous in their browsing habits than I am, though. I can say that it has stabilized significantly since I first tried it shortly after its first public release. The project does bear keeping an eye on, and the Mozilla folks could do worse than to copy some of the ideas (and code) that the project is experimenting with.

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