I just rolled back to Win 10 after finally succumbing to the frustration of Win11 running like frozen molasses.

With a side bonus of Linux Mint 21.2 for good measure. Forgot just how much I enjoyed Mint!

When Sync stopped working on Reddit, I found kbin and Lemmy, and haven’t looked back. Especially with Sync being on Lemmy. Reddit isn’t worth the agitation anymore.

Consuela if she’s Latina.

You assume that the majority of them live there by choice, and not because they lack the resources and opportunities to move. It’s kinda hard to pull up roots and move half way across the country when the economic and political realities of where you currently live force you to remain firmly entrenched in poverty with deliberately restricted access to any means to improve that situation.

By your logic, black people must love prison, too, because they represent a disproportionate percentage of the prison population. I’m sure it has nothing at all to do with disproportionate enforcement against them, right?

Depends. I’m dead serious when I ask this, but are you black, Latino, a woman, queer, Jewish or Muslim, trans or non-binary, liberal or any flavor of politics to the left of Right wing authoritarian fascist, or any combination of those groups? If so, then stay the hell out of any state south of Virginia and east of Illinois. They aren’t just bad. They are potentially deadly, increasingly as a matter or literal public policy. If you aren’t one of those groups, than you aren’t in physical existential danger. You’ll just be stuck in a nightmare hellhole of poverty and ignorance. But you’ll be safe. Mostly.

Honestly, I’ve been everywhere in the continental US. Been to every state, seen just about all there is to see driving over the road for fifteen years, and I can tell you that the southeast is damn near a third world country compared to everywhere else. The infrastructure is so bad it reminds me of when I stayed in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1993. And it’s only gotten worse. I have no desire to ever return now that I’m not required to for my job. Florida used to be the one shining exception, except now it’s embracing a return to 1930s Germany. Stay out of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas in particular.

Nazism hasn’t been stamped out. It’s just been given a number of new names to make it more palatable. A sizeable percentage of American “Conservatives”, especially in the MAGA cult, subscribe to an ideology that is every bit as fascist, nationalist, white-supremacist, and Christofascist as the Nazis. The only difference is the nation they represent. We’re currently seeing a meteoric rise in antisemitic rhetoric from those same elements.

Nazism is just a specific brand of fascist nationalism. Make no mistake, there’s every bit of effort to push several nations, and especially America, into a new fourth Reich in everything but name and nation.

Action Masters were hot garbage. Especially since some of them managed to somehow have even less articulation than their original transforming counterpart, which is saying something.

Bruh… Transformers have been in almost continuous production in one for or another since 1993. They were briefly discontinued in the late 80s and early 90s, and were brought back with the Generation 2 line and then Beast Wars. The longest period that Transformers haven’t been on the market since their introduction to the US market was between Generation 1 and Generation 2 from 1990-1993. Generation 2 fizzled in 1995, and was replace a little over a year later in 1996 with Beast Wars. Since then, the brand has had some continuous shelf presence.

And it’s a huge brand today that is largely sold to adult collectors with an attachment to whichever show or comic they indulged in as a kid. Yes, discontinuation can definitely drive nostalgia and a desire to collect something, but it isn’t a necessity. In the case of Transformers, it’s just created an ever-widening pool of things for new adult collectors to be interested in. Right now, there’s a growing interest in modern updates of the Unicron Trilogy characters (Armada/Energon/Cybertron), which were shows being aired from 2002-2005, followed by Transformers Animated and the Michael Bay films.

That really is the whole point, too. The entire conflict is based on the fact that Barbieland is a construct of the imaginary world created by girls playing with their dolls, in which Ken has only ever been marketed or existed as an accessory to Barbie. His entire existence, in both the real world of marketing and consumerism, and in the imaginary world of Barbie, is predicated solely on giving Barbie arm candy. I’m not entirely convinced that this point was entirely deliberate, but it really does highlight that, in creating a product to give girls a role model that says they can do and be whatever they want, that those girls internalized their understanding of the male-dominated world around them, and flipped that on its head. Their imaginary world is a very literal mirror to our own, and as a result, it is still dominated by the same inherently sexist attitudes, only kinder and gentler because they are created through the lens of childhood innocence. Kids are only able to create with tools and media they understand, and the polarized nature of the world around them, and our intense need to make everything a binary, means that a “fair world” never looks like one where everyone is treated the same. It’s a world where they’re in charge.

I’m not even going to get into the overtly sexist assumption that only girls play with dolls, and with Barbie in particular. Toys are toys, and I never understood the need to tell a kid that something is off limits because it’s pink or is “a doll”. The people who most strongly hold these beliefs tend to be the ones that grew up when GI Joe was a full size doll just like Barbie, with his own clothes and uniforms and such. Well before the idea of an “action figure” came around. These folks played with dolls that were, for all intents and purposes, functionally identical to any girls’ doll of the day, and yet are so quick to slap a Barbie or a Bratz doll out of the hands of their grandsons.

Anyhow, long story short, it’s a great movie that explores some very heavy subject matter, and almost but not quite gets its own premise. Most of the people who are irrationally angry with the film have never seen it, and probably won’t for fear of being turned gay, or worse: liberal.

Gilgamesh, a king. At Uruk.

This may be the funniest thing I have found on Lemmy yet. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Darmok is one of my absolute favorite episodes of Trek!

Yo. And the more time that passes, the less I miss it.

“Thought policing”? It stops being a thought when you put the effort into typing it on your keyboard and spewing it out into the world for everyone else to read.

Getdafugouttahere.

Trans rights are women’s rights.

Trans rights are men’s rights.

Trans rights are human rights.

If you believe otherwise, you’re doing nothing less than questioning the basic humanity of Trans people. And you can fuck right off.

Shall we fiddle now, or fiddle later? Either way, there shall be fiddling!