Mossy Feathers (They/Them)

Imo, we should have one, or at most, two Olympic states. They’d be small countries that are more-or-less politically neutral, and instead of sending teams, their purpose would be to host the Summer and/or Winter Olympics. Construction, maintenance and upgrades of the facilities would be paid for by participating countries, as a percentage of their GDP. That way, the hosting country(ies) wouldn’t have to spend billions building the facilities, they get guaranteed tourism every 2~4 years, the facilities get reused, non-hosting countries have a place to measure their penis size, don’t have to spend outrageous sums to build their own facilities (they’re all paying together, after all), don’t have to bulldoze houses or forests, be concerned with water quality, and probably many other bonuses I’m not thinking of.

Bonus points if the facilities are open year-round for Olympians to train at, so that the athletes are more used to the climate, equipment, tracks, trails, etc.

The biggest downside is that hosting the Olympics is prestigious itself and generates a lot of tourism revenue (which in this case, would only be going to the “static” host(s)). It’s a chance for the host country to show off their economic strength, culture (like during the opening ceremonies), and more. You’d have to convince countries that they’re better off without the tourism and chance to flaunt their wealth.

Probably icbm tech or something, it’s pretty much all they have left.

This. If I’m not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren’t originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn’t worth renewing copyright on).

Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that’s effectively indefinite.

A) Is there a better source for this? It seems like kind of a big deal, but Fox seems like the only major news source reporting on this.

B) does anyone have a list of all “”“confirmed”“” UFOs/UAPs; aka stuff that allegedly came directly from various government sources? Doesn’t have to be US military stuff, it can be from any country as long as it’s allegedly official footage or reports. The fox news article had some UFOs/UAPs I wasn’t aware of (specifically the jellyfish and 2019 pyramid ufos).

This kinda stuff fascinates me. While I’m hesitant to believe that UFOs are actually aliens/inter-dimensional beings, we live in a huge universe. I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility to speculate that an advanced alien race would eventually stumble across our little marble in space. If they had even half the curiosity as humans do, then the prospect of seeing who we are and what we’re doing would be irresistible.

one slice is missing

That looks more like 2~3 slices dude.

In a written statement, the ADL said the decision by Wikipedia was the result of a ”campaign to delegitimize the ADL” and that editors opposing the ban “provided point by point refutations, grounded in factual citations, to every claim made, but apparently facts no longer matter.”

You of all groups should know that the last part of your statement is a common right-wing dog whistle that gets used when someone doubles down after their “facts” get rejected for bigotry and/or inaccuracy. By using that phrase, you’ve automatically cast doubt on the legitimacy of your actions and statements. At best you’re ignorant of a common dog whistle, which is embarrassing for an organization who should be well-versed in this kind of thing; at worst you’ve signaled to everyone that you’re potentially peddling “alternative facts”, which casts doubt on everything you’ve done in the past. Either way, you’re ultimately hurting the Jewish people by making that kind of statement.

Mira Sucharov, a professor of political science at Carleton University, said Wikipedia’s decision represents a major opportunity to reflect on why the ADL is facing scrutiny and rethink communal approaches for fighting antisemitism.

“This is a sign that the Jewish community needs better institutions,” she said.

They really do, and I feel bad for them. The places that should be defending them seem more than happy to ignore them or even throw them under the bus in the name of Zionism.

Like, okay, personal beliefs on Zionism aside, if your organization is tasked with defending a group of people, you should ensure your actions aren’t going to endanger, delegitimize or otherwise encourage bigotry against said group. That means that even if you’re a Zionist Jewish organization, if your task is to fight against bigotry towards Jews, you shouldn’t be ignoring non-Zionist Jews nor should you be dismissing their views. Instead, you should be listening to what they have to say, condensing it and releasing it in an manner easy for non-jews to understand (which means providing political, historical and religious context, because many people, myself included, don’t understand as much as they think they do about Judaism).

In the current context, you should be giving people statements from Zionist and non-Zionist Jews about Palestine, and attempt to include non-biased historical, religious and political backgrounds for events that are occurring.

I think ethnically Jewish people could make an honest argument that they should have some portion of Palestine based on historical origins (I think it’s a weak arguement, but I think you could argue for it). However, that doesn’t excuse the way that the IDF and Israeli government have treated Gaza and the West Bank.

You can criticize the Israeli government while also believing that ethnically Jewish people should be able to have a country they have control over. Other countries do this all the time (get criticized for poor treatment of the “outside” ethnic group(s)), why is this somehow different for Israel? Why aren’t we allowed to criticize Israel? I can talk about how France, a white, French ethnostate, is mistreating Muslims without being a racist bigot; I should be able to talk about Israel the same way.

My biggest complaint about Sims-likes is that the visual style always looks too serious. It gives me the feeling that whatever I’m going to do with my not-Sims, it’s gonna be something that makes me regret my real life.

You wanna know what I did the last time I played the Sims 2 though? I repeatedly held parties at my Sim’s house and then lured the guests into a room they couldn’t get out of. I also used the moveobjects cheat to collect police cars whenever a cop showed up to shut the party down. By the time I was done I had amassed around 70 urns, many hysterical immortal Sims (Sims with households can’t die while visiting someone’s house in the Sims 2), 4 Police cars and a fire truck.

The Sims has a mischievous air to it that tickles the devil on your shoulder and begs you to listen to them. None of the Sims-likes I’m aware of seem to have the same air.

Edit: now I want to play the Sims again.

The sea is literally right there. C’mon.

No. It’s easier to go after the “good guys” than the bad guys because they’re easier to beat. They won’t use all kinds of slimy, underhanded tactics to fuck you over.

Edit: I don’t approve of the lawsuit against valve, but that’s the way of the world. Scummy companies and people have many tools they can use to drag you down to their level.

e;

All the time and it weirds me out. I didn’t do it as a kid; I didn’t start doing it until I reached college. Makes me wonder if it’s a part of, or a remnant of, depression and/or anxiety.

deleted by creator

It was kinda obvious tbh. French and anti-sex are not two things that I’d normally put together.

The alternative explanation is that the employers have investments in corporate real estate and don’t want their investments to lose value. Personally, I think that the the people at the top probably have investments in corporate real estate, while middle managers are the way you describe.

I don’t think the people at the top usually care what the employees are doing so long as they’re making money, and being in the office means they’re keeping corporate real estate prices afloat. As such, being in office makes money for the executives, even if that money isn’t made directly through the company.

Middle managers on the other hand, likely don’t have any significant corporate real estate investments, nor are they as likely get significant bonuses for company productivity. As such, it makes more sense for their motive to be more about control than it is money.

That said, I do know some executives do indeed see employees the way you’ve described them; an infamous example comes to mind about the Australian real estate executive talking about how they needed to bring workers to heel and crash the economy to remind workers that they work for the company and not the other way around. I’m just not sure that many executives actually think about their workers in that much depth. I think if they did then we’d see a stark contrast of very ethical companies and highly abusive companies instead of the mix of workplace cultures we have now; because some ceos would come to the conclusion that a happy worker is a good worker, while others would become complete control freaks.

It was a lot of fun!

It’s not in the slightest.

The furry community had a virtual convention called Furality in VRChat last weekend and it was a lot of fun. Round-the-clock DJs during the weekend, meetups, panels, semi-public game instances (restricted to con-goers only, so technically private but effectively public, which is nice because public VRC tends to have anti-fur/lgbt trolls), and more. There were some really cool avatars in the dealer’s dens that did things I didn’t know you could do with avatars. Then there was an eclipse just before the closing ceremony that caused Furality’s site to crash from the wave of furries trying to switch to the eclipse-viewing world (you could see the eclipse from any of the convention worlds, but they had a world specifically for viewing the eclipse).

Hell, impressively they had a few 250-player instances that actually worked and didn’t immediately crash. They chugged even on high-end PCs, but it’s impressive they got more than 30~40 people into a world and have it still running.

Edit: one of the coolest avatars was Toolbox Motley’s avatar. You can see some of the stuff here (I believe that’s the video he used for his booth in the dealer’s den), and he’s got some tutorials for some of the effects on his channel. One of the most impressive things imo is his teleporter. He’s got a teleporter tutorial that adds portals to your avatar so you can set up portals for friends; and if I understand correctly, it doesn’t use any special OSC or anything, it only uses Unity’s animator (VRC avatars can’t have custom scripts attached to them, so everything has to be done via animations and/or OSC).

This is what a furry in training looks like. You desire a better world, but you realize that such a world is impossible. Then you discover there are other people like you with similar dreams, and that together you can simulate such a world through the internet. Before you know it, you’re role-playing a royal rodent in a chatroom of hundreds of similar-minded creatures.

And you’re loving it.

Imo it’s not the former (kids making content) that’s the issue; that’s something kids have been doing in games for a long time. Gmod, TF2, CS:S, Minecraft, etc. Most of those games have mods made by kids or people who started as kids, and some of them are very successful and have even led them to careers in the game industry.

The thing that’s actually bad is the fact that the kids can make money from it, and the cut they get is almost non-existent. The result is that it encourages kids to design their games in a way that utilizes the kinds of monetization we normally associate with greedy corpos (loot boxes, true microtransactions like charging for extra lives, etc).

If kids weren’t able to make money off it, or if the cut was larger and they restricted the kinds of monetization kids could utilize (no loot boxes, charging for extra lives, etc), then I wouldn’t see an issue with it.

That’s where I think a lot of people miss the mark. For some reason it seems like there’s a view that’s unique to people criticizing Roblox, which is that kids making mods for games is bad; but imo it’s only bad when coupled with a monetization scheme that encourages kids to nickel and dime each other.

Edit: but yes, kids do make content for Roblox and get shitty cuts for it. Also changed a sentence (in bold).

I’ll be honest, it took me a while to start remembering “they/them”, even for myself. However, now I have the opposite problem, which is that I tend to substitute “they/them” for gendered pronouns. Normally that’s not a problem because most people accept neutral pronouns, but some people can be very picky about their pronouns and then I have to remember that “they/them” can’t be universally applied to everyone.

Nah, most enbys are chill and recognize that pronouns can be easy to forget. You’re just upset that people get annoyed when you repeatedly misgender them.